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This new film from indie darling Tyler Taormina makes for intensely kitschy festive viewing, but it never actually coughs up a gift
2/5
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The new film from American indie darling Tyler Taormina certainly makes for intensely kitschy festive viewing. But beneath the charming sparkly wrap, there’s just more of the same underneath: an endless round of pass-the-parcel that never actually coughs up a gift.
On the night before Christmas, three jumbled generations of an Italian-American clan descend on a Long Island bungalow to eat, drink and be as merry as the season itself. This get-together has obviously been a fixture of the family calendar for decades – though initially it’s not quite clear which decade we’re in.
The eventual appearances of a clamshell mobile phone and a robotic vacuum cleaner tip us off that it must be around 2006. But the film is less interested in capturing a specific time and place than a more generalised mood of nostalgia, and the house is festooned with trinkets, fashions, furniture and even dishes that should evoke a non-specific sense of “the olden days” for any viewer under 65. One thickly varnished ham, bejewelled with pineapple rings and glacé cherries, looks as if it might have been roasted in the mid-1970s and has been welded to its serving platter ever since.
It’s a night of rituals nested within rituals, from the singing of carols around the player piano to the airing of old home movies on VHS, plus a bundled-up troop down the street to watch a council procession so caked in fairy lights it makes the children shriek. But well-worn as these customs are, they may not run for much longer. The family’s widowed grandmother (Mary Reistetter) is getting on, and her four adult children (Steve Alleva, Tony Savino, Maria Carucci and Maria Dizzia) discuss if the time has come to move her to a care home, and fund this with the sale of the house.
Most films would use this as a narrative hook, but Taormina is content to leave it floating in the ether – a neo-Dickensian spectre of a possible story yet to come – and instead keeps his audience immersed in the fleeting yet familiar pleasures of the present-slash-past. For a while, it’s all genuinely lovely, but there is an unpleasant moment around an hour into the film when you realise you’re no longer enjoying it that much, and the constant ducking of anything resembling a plot has long begun to grate.
The casting, too, is less charming than first appearances suggest. There are lots of fun, evocative faces: I especially loved the aunt who falls asleep on the stair lift with her mouth wide open. But Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington are almost defiantly underused as the Rosencrantz and Guildernstern of the local police force, while the decision to cast TikTok personality Francesca Scorsese – the 24-year-old daughter of Martin – in a relatively major part becomes, I’m afraid, more annoying with every passing scene. (Steven Spielberg’s 32-year-old son Sawyer also appears in a more minor role.)
It’s just about worth ploughing on for Carson Lund’s cinematography, which captures the American suburban Yuletide in all its borderline-queasy splendour. But – my goodness, is that the time? – you may still find yourself itching to make an early move.
12A cert, 107 min; in cinemas from Friday November 15
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2/5
English