TREES LOUNGE
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Steve Buscemi's excellent directorial debut, mapping the territory of a career drinker whose life has gone off the rails. Wry and intelligent, and not more than a little sad.
The first time we see Tommy, he's zonked in a booth at closing time in the bar that he lives above. The barmaid gives him a kick -- hard enough to wake him up, not hard enough to actually hurt the guy. We somehow sense they have done this before. Tommy (an excellent Steve Buscemi) is a career drinker, a man whose life has turned bit by bit into applied research on the effects of inebriation. Only natural since everything else in his life has failed him. Anyone who thinks barflys are romantic, somehow, need to meet a few.
Tommy, like many career drinkers, is determined not to let himself be blamed for anything. Sure enough, the next day, he's scoping out his former boss and girlfriend. Sure he embezzled from the guy and blew the wad in Atlantic City, but he made his girl dump him and then married her, the bastard! And the more we watch Tommy, the more we despair of him ever really shifting out of neutral and doing anything genuine with his life.
All of this may make TREES LOUNGE sound impossibly depressing. It's not. Buscemi, as director and screenwriter, has found just the right tone for this story -- a kind of wryness, a deadpan humor that's not without a little sadness. Another director would film this kind of material as all-out melodrama, with D.T.s and hysterics and God knows what else. Buscemi has apparently lived through a good deal of what he puts on the screen, and so keeps everything on a firmly realistic level. He knows what fits and what doesn't.
I love movies like this. They take a gallery of sharply defined characters and let them be themselves, instead of dropping them into a stupid prefab plot. There is a plot in the movie, but it comes as a natural outgrowth of what the characters do, not as a way of forcing something to happen. Mike Leigh is another director who has this kind of approach; his NAKED worked in roughly the same way, but was far less forgiving. TREES LOUNGE is more careful and sad than bitter, but is still good at showing us why some people just never seem to get a toehold.
Tommy solves his problem of a job by driving an ice cream truck, taking the route that belonged to a beloved relative (just before he dropped dead of a heart attack). He meets a precocious young girl named Debbie (Chloe Sevigny, also in KIDS), and they seem to hit it off well, but Tommy is pathologically incapable of accepting any responsibility.
We've known people like Tommy. God knows I have, and that's the key to the movie's success. Tommy's answer to life is to get another drink -- not even as a kind of oblivion, the way one of his septuagenarian bar buddies does throughout the movie, but just as a way of finding a familiar piece of terrain. He's more at home with the bottle than he is with another human being, and he's not alone -- there are other denizens of the Trees who are no less screwed-up, but that doesn't mean Tommy has a support structure or anything. In the end, it's just him and his bottle of beer and bourbon. Again. And it's his own damn fault.
Three and a half out of four empty glasses.
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