Tyler Thomas Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point begins with the adage: “For the lost, may they find their way home on Christmas eve”. It’s a motif that holds true for almost every single one of the innumerable Christmas flicks flooding the OTT platforms this festive season. These cloying, Hallmark style, formulaic, feel-good family films are invariably about conversion of Santa Claus haters to staunch believers or single young men and women, with broken hearts, eventually finding their soulmates amid festival preparations.
However, Taormina’s film, while focused on a large extended family, bucks the schmaltzy for the offbeat and the romantic for the real and relatable. Since its premiere in the parallel Director’s Fortnight segment at Cannes last year, it has begun finding its way into several Holiday Films guides and watchlists and is often described as a contemporary Christmas classic.
Nothing much happens on the surface as an extended family gets together for the annual Christmas celebrations at the ancestral home in Long Island. While the rest adhere to the long-standing traditions and rituals, two teenage girls break away to mark Christmas their own new way with a bunch of friends.
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.
Beyond the family is also the cozy community, gathered to watch the parade. There are the goofy cops and the hysterical diner lady, the firemen and the store attendant—in as much of a muddle as the family itself.
Despite the huge, seemingly unwieldy ensemble, each of the characters manages to stand out as an individual even while merging in with the crowd. The not-so-well-known but talented cast includes Steven Spielberg's son Sawyer and Martin Scorsese's youngest daughter, Francesca. Her Michelle, along with Fleming’s Emily, stand out as the two rebellious teenagers.
As Taormina frames the matriarch in solitude, a brooding, melancholic air descends. There is a definite movement of the mood and shift in tone. The rambunctiousness and loud cheer make way for sombreness and slowly fault lines begin to appear as siblings argue over the way forward in dealing with the mom’s deteriorating health and the possibility of selling the home. Just like any other family in any religion or culture and any part of the world. Old home videos ring in a flood of memories, alleviate differences and ring in reconciliations and harmony, at least at that moment in time. Who knows where they'd go from here?
Taormina doesn’t offer any closures, the open-endedness reflecting the familial bonds that are constantly in a state of negotiation and renegotiation. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is essentially a nostalgic, bittersweet tribute to the power of continuities and togetherness of families.
