Trees Lounge (1996, Steve Buscemi) (Patreon)

70/100

Second viewing, last seen during its original theatrical release. I reviewed it on my site (which was roughly a year old; the EW piece that would launch my critical career was about to drop) at the time, giving it a solid three stars out of four on the Maltin scale I then used; was a bit more impressed this time, though maybe that's just because this sort of Cassavetes-influenced, largely plotless indie has become comparatively scarce in the decades since. Haven't actually re-read what I wrote since shortly after I wrote it, so let's try annotating my contemporaneous thoughts sentence by sentence, see where that gets us. 

As one of American independent cinema's most ubiquitous actors, Steve Buscemi has consistently portrayed deadbeats, lowlifes, eccentrics, slackers, and other assorted misfits; it comes as no surprise, then, that his directorial debut amounts to a cautionary paean (yes, I realize that's an oxymoron) to small-town losers. 

Can't argue with this, though the prose is formal enough that I seem to be auditioning for a print gig. (It worked!) "Cautionary paean" is a good phrase that applies equally well to much of Cassavetes; I don't know that I'd seen enough of his work in '96 to recognize how powerfully this film's very first shot evokes it, offering a slightly obstructed view of Carol Kane's bartender (you can't even see that it's her yet) as she starts closing up shop. And the tone throughout is simultaneously "there but for the grace of God" and "a place where you can see that troubles are all the same." Tommy's kind of Cliff as a real person, come to think of it, albeit minus the know-it-all aspect and, for now, the steady job. Emblematic moment: Mike drops Tommy off a few blocks short of Trees (above which Tommy lives, though it's a while before we learn that—a nice touch), so disgusted that Tommy's shrugged off stealing $1500 from his old job and blowing it in Atlantic City that he can't bear to have him in the car anymore...but he doesn't actually say anything (except to mutter "Fuckin' loser" to himself when Tommy's gone), and it's been forgotten by their next scene together. 

What is surprising, given the generally grim subject matter, is how energetic and funny much of the picture is.

Dynamic, too. For a first-time director, Buscemi does a superb job of orchestrating parallel action in the bar that's at once precise and casual; the most satisfying instance occurs early on, as Tommy hits on Crystal using a classic dumb bar trick while Mike and Marie negotiate their own rocky relationship a few feet away, culminating in Marie angrily ruining Tommy's ploy as she storms out. (Eszter Balint's scarcity on movie screens over the past 40 years should be actionable. Even if people assumed for a while that she'd merely played herself in Stranger Than Paradise, this role conclusively proves otherwise.) Editor Kate Williams, whose first gig this was, likely deserves some credit as well, though her subsequent résumé isn't particularly notable. 

Buscemi was reportedly inspired to make Trees Lounge after seeing a Cassavetes retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and the influence is certainly apparent onscreen, but Buscemi's sensibility is less ironic, more sympathetic—when his generally unhappy characters are having a good time, you're enjoying their high spirits and enthusiasm...whereas a party in a Cassavetes film is a grim affair indeed, no matter how drunkenly exuberant the folks attending it may be. (The party in Faces may be the most depressing in movie history.)

So I'd seen Faces, at least. To the above I'd add that Buscemi's tender streak isn't so alcohol-fueled, hence tends to skew less weepy-maudlin; I got choked up when Tommy returns from the men's room (where he's interrupted while trying to cop some free blow) to find Crystal, who was clearly ready to go home with him, passed out in a booth, then gets (correctly) cockblocked by her friend and winds up lying down on the opposite side of the half-circle booth, holding Crystal's unconscious hand beneath the table. That she barely acknowledges him later with her kid at the ice cream truck is all the sting that's necessary. 

Virtually plotless and relatively familiar, Trees Lounge depends largely upon first-rate performances to grab your attention and hold it for an hour and a half; every five minutes or so, it seems, another talented actor—Samuel L. Jackson, Michael Imperioli, Carol Kane, Kevin Corrigan, Mimi Rogers—turns up, rocks the house, and splits...perhaps to return in a subsequent scene, perhaps not.

Originally had a parenthetical above noting that Crystal's friend is played by Brooke Smith and marveling at the insane breadth of Trees' roster, but it was a long interruption so I'm happy to find that I can move it elsewhere. (I'm really doing this annotation one sentence at a time, without reading ahead.) Anyway, it's just nuts how many powerhouses show up briefly here, each making an impression vivid enough that it doesn't feel like one of those '90s Woody Allen films in which the constant parade of famous faces serves only as a distraction. (I'm thinking in particular of Shadows and Fog, though I haven't seen that in decades. One of the few other notable films in which Eszter Balint appears!) Didn't look at the cast list in advance, and nobody's in the opening credits, so it just got funny after a while; I laughed in delighted disbelief when Jackson wandered into the bar halfway through, accompanied by freakin' D'Angelo Barksdale. (I'd have mostly known Gilliard from Straight out of Brooklyn back then.) Had forgotten that Elizabeth Bracco sounds exactly like Lorraine. 

The only real problem with this episodic structure is that one episode in particular—involving a tentative flirtation between Buscemi's character and a teenager played by Kids' Chloe Sevigny (who is outstanding)—is so disproportionately compelling that it makes the rest of the picture seem wan and trivial by comparison; everything that happens after this strand of the minimal plot is resolved feels anticlimactic, and much of what took place before it was introduced seems in retrospect like a waste of time. 

Interesting. I had almost the opposite reaction on second viewing—still riveted by Tommy and Debbie's ill-advised dalliance (and by Sevigny's seemingly instinctive raw naturalism; I kinda fell in movie-love with her for a few years, based mostly on this performance—only her second!), but by no means any less enthused about the rest of the film as a result. Instead, that relationship seems so emotionally fraught that it's arguably too heavy for this generally amiable context (especially since I don't really believe Tommy's claim that they just made out for a while; Debbie's reaction, both in the immediate aftermath and later, strongly suggests otherwise), and I find myself wishing that it had been the primary focus of a different film altogether. (And in fact Buscemi seems to shift into a different formal register during the dinner scene at Debbie's house, suddenly shooting everyone in claustrophobic close-ups for some reason.) In any case, "waste of time" is no longer a phrase I would use about any part of Trees Lounge, excepting maybe the sad running gag with the kid who cannot for the life of him get the ice-cream truck to stop (unless its driver is dead). 

Also, like most novice directors, Buscemi sometimes has difficulty sustaining a consistent tone; while the humor he injects into his downbeat tale is welcome, some of his jokes (in particular, a running gag in which a forlorn tot keeps just missing the ice-cream truck that Buscemi's character drives) are so broadly comic that they belong in some other movie (albeit one I'd like to see).

Didn't like it then either! (I swear I didn't know that was coming. Makes sense, though, and I was right that it could work in a different context.) 

On the whole, however, this is an impressive debut: an independent film more interested in behavior than in attitude, and one that values substance over style. Refreshing.

Co-sign. Animal Factory was a disappointment, but I quite liked Lonesome Jim, and wish Buscemi the director had continued in that goofy-depressive idiom rather than shifting to a Theo Van Gogh remake and a whole lot of TV episodes. (Very well might not be his choice, of course. And he does seem to have a new feature in the can, starring Tessa Thompson and Rebecca Hall.) Also I'm pretty sure that whole paragraph—"more interested in behavior than in attitude," "values substance over style" is subtweeting Trainspotting, which I'd seen three months earlier and not much liked (but have since warmed to a bit). Anyway, quite happy that I was prodded to revisit Trees Lounge, which hadn't been on my long '90s should-give-that-another-look list. Once it seemed commonplace. Now it looks like a sterling example of the ghost of indies past.