COMIC DRAMA; 1hr 47min
STARRING: Matilda Fleming, Maria Dizzia, Francesca Scorsese, Tony Savino, John J. Trischetti Jr, Mary Reistetter, Michael Cera
Round table: The Balsanos chow down
The Italian-American Balsano family of Long Island is the kind of chaotic prospect that is as much of an ask to meet onscreen as it would be to belong to. Their family manse is bursting at its cosy seams when the obstreperous, multi-tentacled clan of four adults and their assorted partners and offspring get together for a blowout Christmas feast.
The kids — tots to teens — are up for anything festive, their olds maybe not so much, with brothers Ray (Savino) and Matt (Trischetti Jr) and sisters Kathleen (Dizzia) and Elyse (Maria Carucci) bickering over how to handle the future of their elderly mother Antonia (Reistetter), whose jumping joint this currently is. And what a joint, its every surface teeming with Noel-themed tchotchkes and its rooms humming with a buzz that refuses to quit. This is celebration as a way of life, the bubbling currents captured by director Tyler Taormina and cinematographer Carson Lund in a roving dance that fizzes with affection. You haven’t actually met these people, yet you come to feel you know them, their quirks and tics at once individual and universally familiar. (The casting is a cool look, too, with Francesca Scorsese and Sawyer Spielberg carrying their own family torches and Cera popping up as a largely mute police officer.)
The Balsanos are a lot to process, though, what with all the piling in and on. Ditching the energy overload, cousins Michelle (Scorsese) and Emily (Fleming), who has been feuding all night with her mother, the excellently frazzled Kathleen, take off with their friends. The adults party on, scrolling through a glossary of intimately relatable moods that deepen from a piano singalong to a meditation on sorrow. You haven’t actually experienced this Christmas, but by the end of its unforced ebb and flow, you may find yourself wishing that you could.
