too Christmas for the arthouse, too arthouse for Christmas
Today I'm writing out of market ambition. I want you to buy Alonso's new book, the revised and expanded edition of Have Yourself a Movie Little Christmas, in which he writes about a film from 2024, Christmas Eve in Miller's Point, one that didn't get the attention it deserved. And I feel strongly enough about this film that I'm going to add my endorsement.
Did you even know that Christmas Eve in Miller's Point existed in the first place?
You're not alone if you didn't. It got a small release last year through IFC with very little publicity. It had a poster that appeared to be designed intentionally to look like a 90s VHS box for a mediocre family comedy. Its trailer accomplished the same thing, with its kaleidoscope of lights, relatively unfamiliar faces and warm, practiced-sincerity narration. It was as if filmmaker Tyler Taormina was daring arthouse audiences: accept this vibes-based thing on its own terms or turn up your nose and ignore it.
There were no press screenings that Alonso and I knew about, only links to watch on a laptop. That's fine. That's currently the standard way for most arthouse films to reach most journalists at this point. We watched it at home.
When it was released in Los Angeles, it was at one or two Laemmle locations (our local arthouse chain) and then, curiously, at a few far-flung multiplexes. We wound up seeing it for the second time (after that laptop situation) at what is now the husk of the Sherman Oaks Galleria. A huge theater. One other person in the audience. Twenty minutes into the film, four older people walked in, perhaps thinking they were late to The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, released roughly at the same time. They talked loudly throughout their brief duration in the theater, then walked out.
"Nothing happens" is a common complaint I hear from audiences who dislike atmospheric films with casual relationships to direct narrative. And Christmas Eve in Miller's Point is a memory piece, set in the early 2000s, with no main character, just a sprawling cast of people swarming through a big house before they spill out onto the streets. It presents like a formalist home movie, a perfect package of hazy digressions that eventually form a through line of story (the matriarch is unwell and this is probably the last Christmas in the family home before it's sold) and so, yes, in terms of mainstream moviemaking, "nothing happens." Of course, that means everything is happening, and in the end, its great success in moving you is built on that.
Taormina's cinematographer, Carson Lund, also directed this year's Eephus, an indie baseball comedy about an early-autumn local league game, a film about The Last Time Before Everything Changes, one that feels intimately connected to Miller's Point, itself a film about a Last Time (both premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival). Lund has said that Eephus, in turn, is influenced by Tsai Ming-liang's masterpiece Goodbye Dragon Inn, about the last night of a rundown cinema's existence and, truly, all three films, in spite of their differences, share a melancholy and sense of loss that accompanies great shifts in human experience. Coming together, leaving for good, all filtered through a fog of sadness.
Alonso is in the habit of watching YouTube packages of Christmas-themed TV commercials from the 70s, 80s, and 90s (he's not just an esteemed film critic, he is also a Christmas Enthusiast, or, as they say in White Christmas, a "weirdsmobile"). Christmas Eve in Miller's Point is akin to the cumulative effect of twelve oddly poignant Radio Shack ads in a row. Alonso cried watching it. You should give it a go yourself, just not on a laptop.
