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‘Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point’ Review: A Sweet, Nostalgic Love Letter to Suburban Holiday-Season Rituals

"Christmas Eve in Miller's Point" is "Ham on Rye" director Tyler Taormina's sweet, sincere love letter to a suburban American family Christmas

Ok, so there are no chestnuts roasting on an open fire — instead there is a salad bowl full to the gluttonous brim with red and green M&Ms — but in almost every other respect Tyler Taormina ‘s delightful stocking-stuffer “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is as alive to the domesticated magic of holiday tradition as any Nat King Cole seasonal classic. They render their ur-Christmas movie, that dangles like a tree ornament on a string of tinsel stretched between Vincente Minnelli’s “Meet Me In St. Louis” and the kind of late-90s TV commercial where insurance companies delivered happy-holidays hokum to their customers, in almost fetishistically fanatical detail. From a soundtrack spackled with Sinatra and 60s pop classics, to the hyper-romantic, gauzy visuals delivered by DP Carson Lund (whose directorial debut “Eephus,” which Taormina produces, is also in Directors’ Fortnight) to the unquestioning presentation of weird family rituals as completely normal, there is no War on Christmas here, just a wholehearted surrender to its folksy, kitschy pleasures.

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