CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER'S POINT (Tyler Taormina 2024)

[Chris Knipp]

TYLER TAORMINA: CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER'S POIT (2024)

This won't replace Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol'

TRAILER

An iridescent Christmas bauble, at once comforting and melancholic: for his third feature, Tyler Taormina films
a Christmas’s Eve get-together for the members of an eccentric Italian-American family. As the night wears on and generational tensions arise, one of the teenagers sneaks out with her friend to claim the wintry suburb for her own. Producer and actor Michael Cera plays an unlikely policeman straight out of Superbad or Twin Peaks. Francesca Scorsese
and Sawyer Spielberg will also be in attendance. - Cannes blurb

Peter Bradshaw, who was "filled with a warm, feel-good glow" by Kaurismaaki's unsatisfactory Fallen Leaves last year, admitted in his four out of five star Cannes review that there "isn’t much plot" in Miller's Point, but described it as a "very charming and rich movie about one huge family’s festivities," that is "engrossing, exalted even."

I could never offer such unreserved praise for a film as chaotic, unfocused, and full of misfires as this. What I can say is that Taormina appears to have recreated, for the cameras, a generous chunk of Yuletide Italo-Americana, Suffolk County Long Island style, complete with the excessive amounts of food, arguments over elder care, and Lon-Gai-Land accents. Perhaps somebody who is not American, or just not from the East Coast, will find this exotic, and therefore interesting. For me it is rather a letter-perfect evocation of what it's like to attend a big gathering where no interesting person is found and no absorbing conversation is had.

There are a few singled out individuals, but there's no attempt to attach names to them or to follow through their personal stories. A big event after the meal is a visual one: a line of fire trucks traditionally drives through the neighborhood strung with colored lights and a lot of the crowd goes out to watch them. It's a dazzling, almost psychedelic experience, because as Alex Harrison points out in Screen Rant, we see through different eyes here from moment to moment, and at this point we're seeing through the eyes of a girl "wearing diffraction glasses," turning the trucks into "a blur of kaleidoscopic bloom."

In the absence of story, we perceive in "snapshot" form, and thus one medley of images that's striking comes after the meal when VCR cassettes are brought out for a showing of images of the past when old family now gone are glimpsed as well as present company when heartbreakingly fresh and young - all a reminder that those who're there at this Christmas Eve won't be the same people at another future one. This creates a powerful shock of vicarious nostalgia-cum-future tripping.

A little poetry is attempted, with a tiny glimpse of success, toward the end, when incidentally it actually starts to snow heavily, there is a scattering of cars that is mysteriously beautiful, and the focus is on young people, who (also mysteriously and more metaphorically than really) pair off, one couple after another. Not so effective is the pair of local policemen (one played by coproducer Cera), who drearily tool around in a cop car and finally stop some local deadbeats, flatly demonstrating not everybody is having a jolly time. The festival blurb's comment that the cops are "straight out of Superbad or Twin Peaks" points up the wavering tone of the whole last third of the movie, because of course Superbad and Twin Peaks have nothing in common.

Sadly, Francesca Scorsese, who is so particular and at ease in Luca Guadagnino's splendid, neglected HBO mini-series "We Are Who We Are," doesn't get to do much here. Nearly everybody gets lost in the crowd - not, unfortunately, the boring man who delivers the meandering toast. But of course the toast has to be boring and meandering. This whole film is about traditions, the boring ones as much as the warmhearted ones. Enthusiasts for this film hint (or menace) that it too may become a tradition, trotted out and shown to us at Christmastime.

You can count me out of that ritual, because not enough stands out here except as annoying. But authentic casting and settings do a lot to make a movie work even when they can't complete the job, and this is a huge dose of atmosphere: that big house (whose real estate status is a key reveal), all these people, all that food, all those silly little presents, above all the pretty snowstorm and the people out in it after the big nosh. That will stay with you. As I've remarked at other times, sometimes a film that's not so slick and lacks easy authenticity can evoke "reality" better by its sheer clumsiness than a more polished one. In this case, though, it's overkill.

Christmas Eve in MIller's Point, 104 mins., debuted at Cannes in Quinzaine des cinéastes (Directors' Fortnight) May 17, 2024, shown at over a dozen other international festivals including Deauville, Hamburg, Vancouver, the Hamptons, Gent, Montclair, AFI. Now distributed in the US by IFC. Vertigo Releasing. Metacritic rating: 78%.