★★★The French have a knack for truth in their psychological dramas that escapes our Hollywood. We can usually manage cinema clichés and less-than-full characters when we do dramas here, and those dramas touch us, but whenever I head into a French drama, I know I’m going to be in the presence of truth. And that I'm going to squirm.
I squirmed in The Tree. There is a group of middling-aged French actresses who seem to fear nothing, and this film adds Charlotte Gainsbourg to that list. Her Dawn O’Neil suffers through her grief so intensely that I feared for her children as she failed to cope; scenes like the one in the kitchen were almost suffocating. The children, too, cope with their grief in ways that only show their pain to those of us watching. The Tree doesn’t explain to us what’s happening in the children’s minds, but we watch their actions and understand that they’re coming from intense pain and loss. Here, too, the French excel at showing the emotions of children. This film has the best evocation I’ve seen of grief in a child since 1996’s moving Ponette.
Julie Bertuccelli also does a fine job of using Australia as a perfect environment for her characters’ grief, too. Australia hasn’t looked this oppressive, unforgiving and harsh since Animal Kingdom. It’s the perfect location for unmitigated emotional pain.
Unfortunately, other elements of The Tree don’t support the heavy lifting that the cast and setting do. There are heavy-handed plot moments, like when Daddy-tree drops a bough on mommy’s bed after she’s been out on a date. Or when the new boyfriend drips over Daddy-tree’s root. Or when we get a one-dimensional secondary character like the arch villainess who lives next door. Lapses like these undermine the other great efforts here.
Still, The Tree has truth in it, and it’s always a great experience to recognize that in a dark cinema.
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