The Tree Review

One Day, One Life, Life in a Day, A Better Life, The Tree of Life and now, simply The Tree. That’s a whole load of movies released over a short space of time with pretty similar titles. Is anyone else getting confused?

The Tree is a quiet Australian drama that invokes many of the same themes and ideas as The Tree of Life (a death in the family, man versus nature, etc) but is told in a way that many may find more accessible – ie, less whispered mumbo jumbo and fewer dinosaurs (though I liked the dinosaurs in Tree of Life. I mean come on –dinosaurs!).

For the record, I liked The Tree of Life and I also kind of like this film. It focuses on a family in the wake of the father (Aden Young)’s death. He leaves behind mother Dawn (Gainsbourg) along with three sons (Christian Byers, Tom Russell and Gabriel Gotting) and daughter Simone (Davies). Simone believes her father’s spirit has become one with the large fig tree that stands next to the family home, which slowly but surely begins to destroy the house as its roots grow like tentacles through the ground. The film studies the family’s grief and the tensions that form between Simone and her mother when she brings a new man into her life (Csokas).

There are a lot of flaws in the film, but there’s also plenty to like. It’s a pleasant change to make a mother-daughter relationship central to a film rather than man-woman or father-son as is so often the case, and Davies and Gainsbourg carry the focal point of the drama very well. The child actors are all very good indeed. Davies gets the most to do and is very impressive for her tender years, though her fellow sprog-thesps also give strong performances. Gainsbourg is typically watchable, giving a similar grief-stricken performance to the one that won her the best actress award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival for Antichrist. Julie Bertuccelli’s understated and sombre yet beautiful direction is also very pleasing.

Unfortunately, the film never really grips you. Moreover, it kind of washes over you, in a not unpleasant but not enthralling way. And whilst Gainsbourg’s performance is good, her character is pretty annoying. It’s difficult to put one’s finger on precisely why the film fails to engage, but I think for all its aesthetic qualities and the high standard of performances in it, there’s nothing in it that really makes you care what happens to the characters.

As mentioned above, The Tree’s much more narrative style may well appeal to many more thanThe Tree of Life’s freeform meanderings – or at least to the people that walked out of Terrence Malick’s latest. Indeed, with a bigger name attached to the project, it may well have caused something of a stir. Whether this flawed picture can find an audience without being bolstered by the presence of an established auteur, only time will tell.