Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is a mosaic comedy, marking a breakthrough for director Tyler Taormina and the L.A.-based collective Omnes Films, which he co-founded.
Times and we change, but the ritual of Christmastime seems to stay the same. It is an established event, meant to (re)assure us–and our loved ones–that our lives, as ordinary as they are–are worth living.
Full of memorable performances, the movie follows an Italian American family converging on its ancestral Long Island home, determined to have a bashful event because it might be their last together.
The camera moves among the ensemble with omniscience — even the family dog gets a spotlight — eventually following the teenagers’ hormonal excursion to paint the rinky-dink town red.
Taormina credits Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising as an influence, even using some of soundtrack from the 1963 short, which matched biker iconography with homoeroticism, and the occult.
As various critics noted, if “Scorpio Rising” engaged with the allure and evil of biker gangs, “Miller’s Point” seems to be both pro- and anti-Christmas.
