Tyler Taormina’s third film holds the promise of a new cinematic voice.
Alfred Hitchcock used to say that clichés per se were neither good nor bad, that everything depended on the point on the road where one stumbled, voluntarily or involuntarily, upon them. In his case, he suggested that it was preferable to start from a cliché and end up in another space (aesthetic, argumentative or thematic) completely different than the other way round: to try to be very original in the approach and then end up falling into the cliché.
It is worth reminding ourselves of this recommendation, not without a certain air of boutade, of course, because Christmas Eve in Miler’s Point fulfils the master’s advice to the letter. If the title, the brief synopsis, the poster or even the first 15 or 20 minutes of Tyler Taormina’s third feature-length project are anything to go by, this is a film we’ve seen many times before. It’s another Christmas movie, a sub-genre that is no longer cliché, but outright cartoonish, as we are reminded every year by all those terrible Hallmark titles. It’s another film about the gathering of a large family around a special holiday. It’s another film about Italian-Americans around a table with food. Yes? Are you sure? Is that all this is?
Christmas Eve in Miler’s Point, fortunately, is in the end nothing of the sort, and even in those opening minutes where it might seem more conventional, there are already hints of its will to be different. The uncontoured symphony of blurred, inverted Christmas decoration lights, contemplated from the back window of a car through the eyes of a child, announces from the credits that this is going to be a sensorial and impressionistic film, where the relationships between characters are going to appear without unnecessary script underlining or emphatic stylistic devices.
There is no great centre of gravity in this choral film. There isn’t even a surprising turning point or a grand final catharsis. Christmas Eve in Miler’s Point is more atmosphere than narrative. More mood-telling than story-telling. And yet, there is a notable and significant transformation in the middle of the film: from the moment when the teenage characters of the family leave the house where the celebration takes place and go to look for their friends in the night of Long Island, the film stops being a Christmas story and becomes a teen-pic, a terrain in which Tyler Taormina feels comfortable as was already clear in his two previous works, Ham on Rye (2019) and Happer’s Comet (2022). And in this change of skin, the film finds its main discourse without needing to explicitly verbalise it: the characters flee from the traditional family as an obligation and prison in order to find their chosen family on the outside, that of their friends, with their own rituals and ways of relating to each other.
Much more, then, than a ‘beautiful film to watch on screen’ (which it undoubtedly is), Christmas Eve in Miler’s Point also represents a new, different, but also simple and honest way of putting emotions on screen. A new voice, that of Tyler Taormina, who in the coming years promises to continue appearing and embellishing the festival circuit and who, unless he radically and surprisingly changes his style, we as spectators will be able to identify and recognise as we do with all creators with an unbribable style right from his first films. And if not as a director, he will appear in any other role in the credits of another work of the collective that co-founded Omnes films (at the Valladolid SEMINCI he could also have appeared as a producer of Carson Lund’s film Eephus).
Joan Pons
Edited by Savina Petkova
© FIPRESCI 2024