There's a scene in Goodfellas where Lorraine Bracco's character finds herself surrounded by the wives of her new husband's mobster mates. Scorsese films this raucous gathering of Italian-American women like a Fellini tableau while Bracco's voiceover makes her disapproval clear, mocking the women's tacky appearance. Tyler Taormina's Christmas Eve in Miller's Point plays out mostly in a home similarly stuffed with Italian-Americans (among them Scorsese's daughter Francesca). There are lots of bad fashion choices, tacky hairstyles and over-applied make-up on display. But there's no expression of contempt from anyone here. This is an unbridled and unfashionable expression of affection for working class get-togethers.
Taormina is one half of the Omnes Films collective along with Carson Lund, who serves as cinematographer here. With Ham on Rye, Eephus and Christmas Eve..., the pair have fashioned a thematic trilogy concerning the sun going down on those things you take for granted. The surreal coming-of-age drama Ham on Rye mostly follows a teenage girl coping with being left behind in her small town after her friends have been beamed away through some unexplained supernatural rite of passage, but it's essentially a metaphor for the kids who don't go to college and face an uncertain future in a hometown that now looks very different. Eephus follows two amateur baseball teams as they play out one last game on a field that's about to be demolished. In Christmas Eve..., the extended members of the Balsano family gather for what will likely be the last such shindig at the suburban home in which they grew up. The family matriarch is struggling with senility and a nursing home beckons, with her adult children planning to sell the home.
A conventional drama with this setup would no doubt feature many scenes of misty-eyed siblings monologuing their fond memories of the home. But Taormina is far from a conventional filmmaker and here he takes the "show, don't tell" maxim to its extreme. He hands us a plate of cold cuts, puts a cold beer in our hands and tells us to make ourselves at home. The effect is like wandering into a stranger's home, initially overwhelming as it's filled with people we don't know from Adam. By the time the credits close we still haven't gotten to know everyone, and we've only been made privy to small snippets of their lives, but we understand why this traditional family get-together is so important, even if some of the characters don't.
With its wandering camera and zooming lens, interrupted dialogue, comic vignettes verging on the absurd and too many characters to keep track of, Christmas Eve... is reminiscent of some of Robert Altman's less appreciated ensemble dramas like A Wedding and HEALTH. There's no particular over-arching narrative here, and it would be a stretch to call any of its various subplots stories. In its construction, Taormina's film is akin to the assembly of a Christmas tree: each bauble adds something new to the display, and some are getting a little ragged, which makes them all the more special.
Some characters emerge as more central than others. Maria Dizzia's Kathleen and her teenage daughter Emily (Matilda Fleming) are arguably the heart of the film. The pair bicker like so many mothers and their teenage daughters, and anyone who mistreated their mother as teens (didn't we all in some way?) may find a lump in their throat at a subplot concerning an unopened gift exchanged between the two, or when Emily can't understand why her mother asks her to pass some dinner table buns that are within her reach. With her warm face, Dizzia is a stand-in for all our mothers: when she's happy, we're happy; when she's hurt, it's devastating. We've all been Emily too though, and we understand when she ditches her extended family to head out for some mischief-making with her friends.
In similar fashion to Ham on Rye, Taormina's latest concludes with a teenage girl wandering the empty streets of her town, seeing everything she took for granted through a fresh lens. Taormina has a knack for making us appreciate people by filming their absence. His empty rooms and early morning streets are reminiscent of the shots that close John Carpenter's Halloween, but the effect here is soothing rather than chilling. He also gives us another teenage mating ritual, filmed here like some alien's anthropological study, and we feel we know these teens simply from the music playing through their car stereos and their level of awkwardness with one another.
There's something of John Huston's 1987 screen adaptation of James Joyce's The Dead about Taormina's latest, with two moments involving a viewing of old home movies and the reading of a discovered manuscript by a budding author that echo the quieting effect on Huston's Dublin partygoers when someone engages in a musical or poetic recital. It's not hard to think of the young Taormina observing his own family's holiday gatherings and taking mental notes. Or perhaps, like Emily, he did his best to get out of such occasions and this is his way of making up for the memories he missed out on. Either way, Christmas Eve in Miller's Point is like the best sort of Christmas present, one you didn't know you needed, wrapped with tender care in traditional tones of red and green.
Directed by: Tyler Taormina
Starring: Michael Cera, Francesca Scorsese, Matilda Fleming, Sawyer Spielberg, Elsie Fisher, Maria Dizzia, Ben Shenkman, Gregg Turkington
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