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With: Michael Strassner, Liz Larsen, Olivia Luccardi
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Written by: Jay Duplass, Michael Strassner
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Directed by: Jay Duplass
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MPAA Rating: R for language
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Running Time: 99
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Date: 09/05/2025
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Christmas Tooth
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
Jay Duplass's extremely simple but sweet, touching, and memorable holiday comedy-romance The Baltimorons gets its power from its deep commitment to its characters and their backgrounds, concerns, flaws, and longings.
It's Christmas Eve and Cliff (Michael Strassner), who is six months sober, is going to have dinner with his fiancée Brittany (Olivia Luccardi) at her family's house. Unfortunately, he slips on a loose brick on their front porch and knocks out a tooth. Bleeding profusely, he searches for any dentist that might be open, and he finds Didi (Liz Larsen). She's not amused by his fear of needles, nor by his goofy behavior once on nitrous oxide.
When he's finished, he realizes his car has been towed, so Didi finds herself driving him to the impound lot, and then, when the lot seems to be closed, helping him break his car out. After that, Cliff invites the older Didi to dinner, and they spend some time looking for a restaurant, until she works up the courage to visit her daughter and her newly remarried ex-husband instead, with Cliff's help. Following that, they visit an improv show, which Brittany has strictly forbidden, lest Cliff fall of the wagon. As the night grows later, and their adventures pile up, Cliff begins to rethink his life and love.
Named after the Cliff character's improv comedy group, The Baltimorons was directed by Duplass, and co-written with actor Michael Strassner. It's Duplass's first feature movie in a long time, since the similarly simple, but warmly effective The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, and also his first time making a movie without his brother Mark. But it continues their small-scale, somewhat metaphysical style of character studies like The Puffy Chair, Cyrus, and Jeff, Who Lives at Home.
On the surface, not much happens, and characters interact in an almost mundane way, but there also seems to be something greater going on, some spiritual kind of connection. Here, Cliff and Didi may seem to have absolutely nothing in common, and indeed, Didi may not even seem to like Cliff at all. Their relationship may feel a little off-putting. But over the course of their evening together, they find something intangible, something that we ourselves might not even be able to see and feel, but it's something they share.
During the ride, Duplass gently and tenderly deals with some of their most pressing troubles, not finding solutions, but simple steps forward. Its vaguely questionable title aside, The Baltimorons is a small treasure, good enough to become a perennial holiday re-watch.
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