Movie Review: 'The Sea of Trees'

Toward the chronological beginning of “The Sea of Trees,” Arthur Brennan (Matthew McConaughey) is sitting at home, depressed and anguished, when he does a Google search for “a perfect place to die.” The top result is Aokigahara aka the Suicide Forest aka Sea of Trees, located at the Northwest base of Mount Fuji in Japan.

Arthur drives to the airport, refusing even a snack on the plane, and is dropped off by a cab at the edge of the Suicide Forest. There is a sign posted out front, warning him: “The life you were given by your parents is precious!” Another reads: “Hold on a second.”

Throughout this sequence, the movie’s soundtrack bounces along, strangely optimistic. The cinematography by Kasper Tuxen (“Beginners”) beautifully captures the landscape with sweeping shots of the forest and, later, intense close-ups of McConaughey’s face framed by firelight.

Inside the Sea of Trees, Arthur settles on a large rock, pulls out some water and pills, and begins to take them. He is interrupted by another man in the forest, Takumi Nakamura (Ken Watanabe). Arthur seems puzzled, asking this bleeding, fumbling figure what he is doing in the Suicide Forest. Is he lost?

Arthur’s reaction in this moment is the first indicator that there is something deeply wrong with director Gus Van Sant's “The Sea of Trees.” Nakamura is clearly in the Suicide Forest to kill himself. Arthur tries to show Nakamura the trail out back to the parking lot. The path is suddenly gone, magically. They cannot escape. Arthur becomes determined, in that moment, to help Nakamura get home even as he himself is still pretty sure he still wants to die.

The two men start talking:

“This place is what you call ‘purgatory,’” Nakamura explains.

“God is more our creation than we are his,” Arthur says, moments later, blowing Nakamura’s mind.

Suicide is the most grave of topics and these two characters try to talk honestly about their feelings, but their language is quite stilted.

The screenwriter of “The Sea of Trees,” Chris Sparling (“Buried,” “ATM”), writes dialogue so literal and determined as to have more in common with an affidavit than a screenplay.

Consider Arthur's description of his marriage's end: “I was wrong to treat my wife the way I did and she was wrong to treat me the way I did and now we’ll never get to say we’re sorry.”

The film cuts back to a time before Arthur went to Japan. Arthur and his wife Joan (Naomi Watts) are a deeply tedious, unhappy couple. Joan is an alcoholic real estate broker. She resents her husband for quitting a lucrative job to become an adjunct professor. The characters argue ceaselessly about anything:

“You’re home early,” Arthur says.

“I should feel bad about that, too?” Joan responds.

The other half of the movie involves Arthur and Nakamura stumbling around the forest, looking for a way out. There are a handful of sequences in which Matthew McConaughey falls off and onto rocks. He falls on rocks after accidentally stepping off the side of a cliff, getting a branch stuck in his side, blood everywhere. He falls into rocks after getting knocked down by rushing water. He is reaching for a walkie talkie and falls onto a bunch of rocks. Throughout, McConaughey is crying out in pain. His increasingly fractured glasses contribute to his folly. This is all shockingly funny.

The movie chugs along this way, flipping back and forth between the woods (they’re still lost) to the marriage (they still hate each other). The long, slow grind of “The Sea of Trees” is a dull, mirror image of Van Sant’s recent quadrilogy of independent features (“Gerry” (2002), “Elephant” (2003), “Last Days” (2005), and “Paranoid Park” (2007)) which, while also slow and long, are that type of long and slow that people do like. The opening scene from “Gerry,” for example, is beautiful, even as it contains no dialogue at all:

2003’s “Elephant,” about a Columbine-like school shooting, won the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the award for best film. “The Sea of Trees,” in contrast, was booed at its Cannes premiere in May 2015. Critics ravaged the movie, with former Variety film critic calling it a film “for nobody.”

Before production began on "The Sea of Trees," Van Sant talked about his plan to shoot the movie in the actual Suicide Forest.

“My latest feelings is to try to shoot in Japan,” Van Sant told Variety at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. “If it’s too difficult, we would probably go to the northwest in the States, where the land is very similar.”

They settled on Foxborough, Massachusetts. Such a lack of follow through and precision spills out all over this film.

Toward the end of "The Sea of Trees," there is a lot of theist messaging about destiny and God’s plan. It’s heavy-handed, blatant, unintentionally hilarious and, really, par for the course. [C-]

Reviewed at the Tribeca Screening Room in New York, Aug. 24, 2016. Running time: 111 minutes.

"Sea of Trees" opens Friday, Aug. 26 on all video on demand platforms and will be showing at the City Cinemas Village East daily at 11:45 a.m., 2:20 p.m., 4:50 p.m., 7:20 p.m. and 9:50 p.m.

Photo courtesy of A24