The Tree, based on a book about how a family weathers the death of its father and matures, is a literalized metaphor. The tree stands in for the father, for the Father, for the family, and for some other things seemingly unintended. The central problem is that director Julie Bertuccelli takes the metaphor neither literally enough nor figuratively enough. It’s neither definitely spiritual nor definitely psychological. And it’s not that I abhor ambiguity, it’s that the fence-sitting produces some scenes that are hard to read, or at least hard to read in a way that doesn’t yank you out of the experience of watching the film. (Excuse me while I eat my words with respect to writing.) Consider a scene in which Mom (Charlotte Gainsbourg)’s new boyfriend, George (Marton Csokas), comes over with a professional crew to remove the tree, and the daughter, Simone (Morgana Davies), climbs up and threatens to jump. Have Australians not read about eco-terrorist methods in the American Northwest, or is Bertuccelli attempting to insert an incongruous moment of political representation in an attempt to unite in affect family drama and ecological drama, personal empathy and environmental empathy? Answer: Can a tree shake its head?
To pick up a stick: I’ll suggest that the unproductive slippages of meaning resonate in parallel with more technical measures of sloppiness. The writing is at times downright bad, and Bertuccelli is apparently too impatient a director to facilitate both deliveries of the right pitch or performances of the right timbre. Which brings us to the music, which is fine, if too phoned-in during the bereavement-moods.
But this is all too sour and too fast. The film takes its time, mostly to its credit. (I felt like I was in the theater for at least two hours, rather than 100 minutes; not always a good feeling, but nevertheless…) There are poignant moments and funny ones. So why doesn’t it seem sufficient, or even necessary, for me to elaborate the ways in which The Tree is successful or enjoyable? What is the power of critical negativity for the reviewer and against film? A review foments something; it cuts or grows away from the film through a labor antithetical to that of the cast and crew. The tree is The Tree, and when George tells Simone, “There’s a limit to the love of nature,” he pronounces in the ear of this writer, poisoned daily by human displays of unmitigated hatred for animals, a challenge. In order to foster the Good, is it enough to wager on a true analysis of failings? Or does one have to embark on a positive, constructive project even with foreknowledge of the inevitability of failure?
The Tree reminds us that we all die, and that before each of you dies you’ll have to live with the deaths of the others. Which others will we consign to which deaths? How can we begin to ask these questions of a film with no pretensions to address them, instead of addressing only the pretensions of a film? In writing, I have become tangled amid planes of concern and orders of imagination in a manner no less hopeless than did the The Tree entangle itself. Toward Gordian knots and knotted limbs and limned trees and treeless futures.
