"On Christmas Eve, a family gathers for what could be the last holiday in their ancestral home. As the night wears on and generational tensions arise, one of the teenagers sneaks out with her friends to claim the wintry suburb for her own." 

OUR MOVIE REVIEW:

From writer/director Tyler Taormina, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is the cinematic equivalent of a Yule log. It’s best put on in the background to create a little atmosphere, and then largely ignored.

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The official plot synopsis reads: “A family gathers on Christmas Eve for what could be the last holiday in their ancestral home. As the night wears on and tensions arise, one of the teenagers sneaks out with her friends to claim the wintry suburb for her own.”

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A better description might read, “A family Christmas celebration is told through a series of vignettes that never focus long enough on any one character for the audience to really care.”

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The movie stars a cast of mostly unknowns, plus Michael Cera as a cop, for some reason.

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If there was a script, it could have just as easily been improvised, because there are literally no interesting threads that connect into any kind of discernible plot. Instead, we watch little segments of Christmas unfold at an average Midwestern home. What’s most remarkable is how utterly unremarkable it all feels.

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If this was meant to be a comedy, it’s dryer than the turkey in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

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William Butler Yeats once wrote, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Yeats was writing about moral apathy during an apocalyptic event in his poem “The Second Coming.”

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I thought of this famous line while watching Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point. I felt the kind of restless apathy that made me wish something apocalyptic would happen, either in the film to shake things up or in my actual life, just to break up the monotony.

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That I was thinking of a 120-year-old Irish poem while watching a full-length feature film is telling – if not damning.

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Perhaps what Taormina was trying to capture is the feeling of apathy, displacement, and utter boredom that can be felt around Christmastime, especially at large gatherings when you’re surrounded by distant relatives in a space where it can be difficult to find any real, lasting, or meaningful human connections. If that was the point, then this is a masterpiece of modern social commentary.

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Viewed as a Christmas movie, that time-honored tradition and pillar of the Western holiday season, this felt too unfocused to be enjoyed by average audiences, and not experimental enough to be truly appreciated by cinephiles.

It’s not quite a lump of coal in your stocking, but it’s also not remotely close to that Optimus Prime I always wanted as a kid. Instead, consider this a pair of wool socks – perhaps useful in some circumstances, but otherwise best kept tucked away in a drawer and forgotten.