May 15--Here at the Cannes Film Festival, major titles receive two world premiere screenings. First comes the casual-dress press screening. Then, a few hours or a day later, comes the virtually guaranteed friendly confines of the official, formal premiere. At the latter, ovations of several minutes are not uncommon. The press premiere is often a different, looser, meaner story.
I can't speak to the fancy-dress screening of the new Gus Van Sant film "The Sea of Trees" starring Matthew McConaughey, Ken Watanabe and Naomi Watts. But at the earlier press bow Friday evening, Van Sant's latest (and, sadly, perhaps his drippiest) was well and truly booed by several dozen of the hundreds in attendance. Equal parts pat contrivance and limp emotional exploitation, this is the first dud of the 19 main competition titles competing this year for the Palme d'Or.
If it wins any awards come May 24 I'll buy a hat, saute it in some butter, a few herbs, maybe some asparagus spears, and then politely ask someone to eat it.
There's an unrelated Robert James Russell novella of the same title, minus the "The." But the book bears no resemblance to the movie beyond the setting of the evocative "suicide forest" known as Aokigahara, at the northwest base of Japan's Mount Fuji.
Van Sant's film, shot mainly in Massachusetts, concerns a grief-stricken American (McConaughey) who has come to the forest to die for reasons a labored heap of flashbacks (Watts plays his alcoholic wife) spells out all too clearly. There, amid the greenery, the McConaughey character meets a man (Watanabe) who has been wandering for two days, and who apparently has the same goal in mind.
The narrative contains a secret or two. I wish "The Sea of Trees" had more going for it than those revelations. The characters are criminally bland; screenwriter Chris Sparling wrote the undervalued thriller "Buried" (Ryan Reynolds stuck in a coffin), so he's clearly unafraid of getting his characters talking, often to themselves.
But his dramatic instincts are all off here, as is Van Sant's generally reliable nonsense detector. The boos, as they say, have it. So far at Cannes the quality of the U.S. directors' work -- -- "The Sea of Trees" arrived a few hours after the world premiere of Woody Allen's disappointing "Irrational Man," an out-of-competition offering -- -- doesn 't say much for American film, or festival director Thierry Fremaux's instincts in that direction. At least this year. At least so far.
mjphillips@tribune.com
