Taormina’s style is strikingly frenzied, especially at the start, with lights flashing past a speeding car in which Kathleen’s (Maria Dizzia) family, including her daughter Emily (Matilda Fleming), is rushing to her mother’s home.
Things are just as frenetic inside the bustling house full of people. Cheerful welcomes, hugs and kisses, elaborate meal preparations, video games of the kids, raging hormones of the teens—a deliberate sense of chaos holds sway. The soundtrack is also suitably flush with many-splendored songs.
Taormina strings together several moments. It’s all about incessant chatter as the camera moves from one set of random, banal, everyday conversations to the next. While parents worry about their kids locking themselves in their rooms and not getting outdoors enough, kids think their fathers are narcissists. The elders dutifully sing the carols, and the reckless youngsters dismiss the Christmas gifts as “capitalist propaganda”.
The camera is like a fly-on-the-wall and as an audience it feels like we are peeping into the private space of a family, one that feels annoyingly like our own. In this visual pandemonium it gets difficult initially to get the broader family tree together. Who is related in what way to whom? You keep wondering. Not that it really matters. However, gradually the relationships—the aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces—start falling into place.
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