'Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point' Review: Tyler Thomas Taormina’s Odyssey of Cheer
Tyler Thomas Taormina depicts the euphoric chaos of Christmastime unlike any filmmaker has ever showcased in ‘Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point’. Yet there are glaring flaws that prevent it from becoming the next great Christmas classic.
No filmmaker has ever captured the warped euphoria of a family Christmas party quite like Tyler Thomas Taormina in ‘Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point’. Having no ‘plot’ other than an Italian-American family reuniting on December 24th for what’s likely to be one last dinner in their ancestral home, Taormina plunges us into the joy, excitement, and longing sense of finality that Christmas brings to them each year. He begins with a brilliant opening credits scene that sets the table for what’s to come, a celebration of Christmastime more than actually depicting a story within that setting.
Some may strongly refer to it as a “vibes” movie, where the atmosphere and visual/aural pleasures offered by Taormina count more than plot and character development. None of the characters presented in this movie have any tangible development or arc. They’re people whom you may know and may reflect upon you when Taormina positions them within his constantly dizzying camera that careens around the house like an invisible participant at a party.
Cinematographer Carson Lund deftly captures fragments of conversation, exactly the kind of thing that happens during a party where too many people are present. We cannot hear everything said in the living room, basement, or garage, where some of the men get away from the chaos to smoke cigars, but discern enough to understand what’s happening. The family is preparing for the eventual death of Aunt Isabelle (JoJo Cincinnati), who has lost most of her ability to function over the past year, and they discuss what their options are as they know this is likely their last Christmas together.
This situation hit me like a whiplash because I was one of the members who was stuck in the middle of a discussion on a likely final Christmas with our grandfather, who, in 2017, lost most of his ability to function and passed away just a few months later. The realization that this would likely be the case was heartbreaking, even as we tried to spread as much ‘cheer’ as possible within the house. This also occurs in the movie – Lund strikes our eyes with a sequence that examines how a child sees a parade of Christmas lights as pure, unadulterated magic, never knowing what they were born into and what the ‘adults’ are talking about.
Hell, they’re spending their time in the basement playing video games. They have no idea what’s happening upstairs and likely won’t until Isabelle dies. This is all fed through Taormina’s supremely confident visual style that’s never flashy nor too involving. In fact, how its camera moves around the house, or how editor Kevin Anton cuts between the settings within the party, is enough to fully immerse us into the proceedings that we inevitably become part of the discussion and the realization that this could be it for the family.
One such scene affirming this belief occurs before the movie transitions away from the party and follows a group of teenagers, some of them played by Francesca Scorsese and Elsie Fisher. As the family reunites in front of the TV to watch a home video, Taormina and Lund slowly zoom onto the TV and plunge us inside the video. In this specific occurrence, I began sobbing uncontrollably in a puddle of tears because I saw my family reflected inside the tape. My grandparents have kept VHS tapes of me as a child and family parties of the 1980s-1990s that were recently digitized, and seeing them for the first time in such incredible clarity not long ago was an overwhelming experience for all of us.
When you see old videos of yourself, either when you were a baby or a small toddler (and in the case of my family, much younger), there’s no sense of nostalgia because you likely don’t remember this having happened, there’s a longing anguish that our time on this Earth is finite, and time has passed so quickly that we barely have an idea what happened in those events that were captured on tape for us to hold onto. Right then and there, I was ready to hail Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point the greatest Christmas movie ever made because Taormina tapped into something so true and reflective of how we perceive this time as human beings that it put every single filmmaker who made a Christmas picture to shame, even Frank Capra and Bob Clark.
Unfortunately, it’s also where the film began to lose me, as it moves away from the dinner and follows the teenagers in their adventures of buying alcohol and evading two emotionless police officers, respectively played by the kings of deadpan comedy, Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington. While their presence is more than welcomed and contains lots of laughter in its final sections, the teenager proceedings feel far more unfocused than the party sequence, which imbued its images with so much incredible meaning that quickly drew us into the chaos.
Taormina loses the chaos in favor of subtlety, which isn’t a bad thing. However, when he doesn’t have much to say about the characters he’s filming who, for the first time in the movie, feel distant from the audience (and a movie like this requires closeness to the action, even if the protagonists don’t change), it’s hard to continue ourselves to a picture that started out strong but isn’t sustaining itself the more it drags on.
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything to hold onto. For instance, the acting is excellent all-around, and the final shot hits you with intense amounts of devastation so powerful it may lead to a reappraisal of its concluding section. However, when Taormina overwhelms your senses in its first half with impeccably controlled vérité camerawork and visual storytelling, you expect the rest of the movie to follow suit. If not, the sense of proximity with the characters must continue. When it doesn’t, it ultimately renders the last half of Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point more like a series of listless vignettes that, while pretty looking, don’t have the same impact as its bravura party scene did.
Still, this is a movie to see with your whole family, provided you leave as soon as Taormina cuts away from the home video, never reaching the emotional apex he built with one simple gesture.