The Tree
Village East Cinema, July 26, 2011
Movie #47 for 2011
The second-to-opening shot of The Tree is a wide Northern Queensland desert with a truck driving slowly down a dirt road. The bush is not particularly archly shot, or lit (not glammed up like it was in Beautiful Kate, say), it kind of just is. It’s stunning. God damn, Australia is a good looking country. It’s one of the things I liked best about this film.
In The Tree, Peter (ADEN YOUNG) is a truck driver, a devoted husband to Dawn (CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG) and a loving father of four. They all live together on a property out of town with an enormous, spectacular Morton Bay Fig overshadowing the house. When Peter suddenly dies, the grieving family take to thinking - in their different ways - that he communicates with them through the tree. When the roots and falling branches of the tree begin to invade the house and disrupt life there, difficult choices must be made about hanging on to grief or letting go.
Adapted from a novel by the director JULIE BERTUCELLI (Since Otar Left), the household after Peter’s death is a well-drawn, quietly fraught place. It would have been even better to have had a sense of how the family worked before the event, so as to better understand how different they are after. I get the sense that it’s “at least a bit”, but that’s part of the book that was left un-adapted. There is that distinct, literary feeling of more going on below the surface than you have access to.
Much of the dialogue is also decidedly literary - the young children are uncommonly wise, for example. This may work on the page, but the young actors sometimes struggle to pull off such adult dialogue. Otherwise though, they are tremendous (especially the daughter, played by MORGANA DAVIES, pictured above with Gainsbourg).
I liked the visual style of the film, which supported it as the tree metaphor was labored to its logical and unsurprising conclusion.
