Each year of the annual
prestigious Cannes Film Festival, I always find myself more interested in the
films that got roundly booed than the Palme d’Or winners or critical
favorites. Called the ‘toughest audience
in the world’ by many, it seems customary for booing to ensue at Cannes and
this year the target is one of Cannes’ very own past Palme d’Or winners, Gus
Van Sant. The film in question is The Sea of Trees, the less exploitative,
slightly artier and far schmaltzier movie about Japan’s Aokigahara suicide
forest released in the same year as The
Forest with an overqualified yet limited cast featuring Matthew McConaughey,
Ken Watanabe and Naomi Watts. Selected
for competition for the Palme d’Or, the distinguished and at times divisive
auteur behind Good Will Hunting, Drugstore Cowboy, Elephant and Milk, the
hotly anticipated The Sea of Trees was
met with a deafening chorus of booing and jeers, going down in infamy as one of
the worst films shown at the 2015 festival before sitting indefinitely on the
shelf. Only now is the $25 million film
getting released simultaneously in theaters and VOD, where in only its second
week it barely pulled in $800,000 and left multiplexes as swiftly as it
appeared out of nowhere. As of current,
it is holding 9% on Rotten Tomatoes, the lowest score for a Gus Van Sant film
to date, surpassing the notoriety caused by his 1998 remake of Psycho.
For such an esteemed and respected auteur, how could the winner of
numerous prestigious film festivals from around the world and director of so
many critical darlings have fallen so hard this time around?  |
| I'm not comfortable with you hugging me. Get your filthy hands of me now. |
Generally I find myself
liking, if not appreciating, what a Cannes dog can and has done in the
past. Films like Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Only
God Forgives, Enter the Void, The Brown Bunny, Southland Tales and Marie
Antoinette have all been savaged at Cannes yet are now cult favorites with
effusive critical reappraisal. All have
something unique to offer even if it wasn’t to everyone’s liking. If nothing else, they’ve turned me against
notions of artistic pretentious elitism often harbored at the festival. But every now and again, films like Grace of Monaco and now The Sea of Trees come along where upon
seeing them I get the hate they’ve received and don’t feel the least bit bad
about the nose dives either film took at the box office. Monaco,
for instance, went from being this prospective Oscar bait vehicle with a
distinguished cast behind it to being dumped on Lifetime Network in the
U.S. The
Sea of Trees is sadly for Gus Van Sant an artistic and commercial failure,
a film with many virtues that manages to squander and undo everything that came
before the third act, thus embodying that dreaded catchphrase of ‘ruining the
whole thing’. I have faith and full
belief Van Sant will recover from what is easily his greatest misfire to date
as a director. Until that moment comes,
my friendly suggestion is to pass on The
Sea of Trees. Everyone involved has
done better and the subject itself deserves a far better movie than this
farcical and sugary chocolate turkey.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki
