Trees Lounge

Trees Lounge is so deft, funny, and light-handed it may not be until the film’s shattering final image that you realize you’ve been watching one of the most lived-in portraits of an alcoholic ever made. Read full review

Trees Lounge is not much more than a jumble of beautifully acted sketches that introduce the characters in Tommy's world. Read full review

Ubiquitous screen presence Steve Buscemi makes an impressive writing/directing debut in this depiction of small-town alcoholism. Read full review

Buscemi's semi- autobiographical first feature as writer/director is a beautifully low-key, disarmingly perceptive blue-collar character-study, reminiscent of vintage Cassavetes in its sociological and emotional authenticity. Read full review

If anybody ever wrote a Field Guide to Alcoholics, with descriptions of their appearance, sexual behavior and habitats, there would be a full-color portrait on the cover of Tommy, the hero of Trees Lounge. Read full review

Comically rueful, semi-autobiographical, warmly appealing. [25 Oct 1996, p.C8]

There's nothing "big" about Trees Lounge : Its comedy, as well as its drama, is purposely understated, culminating in a long shot that uses an actor's face to speak volumes. It has the spirit of Cassavetes in it, only it's not nearly so self-indulgent, and its emotions are so real they hurt. [25 Oct 1996, p.5G]

The film’s virtues are modest, but Buscemi has come out on top by taking on people and a place he clearly knows inside out. Read full review

The movie is bracing, bleak and funny, assuming you can appreciate the comedy in a story full of lowlifes, lushes and losers. Read full review

Buscemi handles all of this with a casualness that seems exactly right for the milieu. His characters aren't caught up in a great dramatic crisis, they're caught up in everyday life, going over these events like so many speed bumps in time. [18 Oct 1996, p.F12]

Trees Lounge gives the appearance of being slight, spontaneous, and effortless. It would be easy to write off Buscemi's maiden effort as a serendipitous fluke, but just like that squirrely face of his, you know that surface values are merely the outer layer. Read full review

Buscemi eschews the conventional and ends "Trees Lounge" on a stranger, more tantalizing note. Read full review

Where Cassavetes often uncovered the grotesquerie underlying such desperate lives -- usually after one round too many -- Buscemi's vison is rooted in compassion and a quirky humor that's entirely his own. Read full review

The central question of Trees Lounge is whether Tommy will ever get wise to himself. The movie does not exactly provide an answer to the question, but Buscemi poses it in an entertaining, insightful and humane way. [24 Oct 1996, p.4G]

Buscemi has pulled off a deft feat: He doesn't romanticize his characters, but he doesn't condemn them as losers either. They're just people. [25 Oct 1996, p.12]

Buscemi gets such fine ensemble work out of his actors that you never doubt that Tommy and his friends, family and ex-friends are united by one thing. They've spent far too much time together. [25 Oct 1996, p.F6]

Though nothing much happens in the plot, the interplay between characters is always sharply observed, with funny, off-kilter dialogue: Whether it's a clumsy pickup attempt at a bar, a couple fighting about which of them cares more about the other, or the attempt by relatives to console each other at a funeral -- while sharing lines of cocaine -- the scenes feel both spontaneous and deftly constructed. [1 Nov 1996, p.D3]

Buscemi is after a slice of life with a grown-up slacker. The trouble is that, in the end, this isn't terribly interesting. Read full review

Buscemi wittily captures the desperation of lives gone downhill in prettified surroundings although, like the Trees Lounge patron who suddenly stops breathing, the audience feels the life force slowly being sucked out. [11 Oct 1996, p.70]

An all-too-familiar barfly story that often seems aimless. [25 Oct 1996, p.A]

While it paints a convincing vision of lives ruled and ruined by the bottle, none of this makes for compelling viewing. Certainly not an hour-and-a-half of it. Read full review

Though the film occasionally conveys some of the sweetness of early Cassavetes it has none of the mystery: these characters are enjoyable types but not a lot more. Certainly the cast has fun. Read full review

There are effective moments, a dime clutching tot watching an ice cream van plough gently into a garden wall after its driver has a heart attack, gives a stylish laugh, but at the end of the day perhaps a trip to the bar will be more fun. Read full review

I like Steve Buscemi. I really do, which is why it's such an disagreeable task to write a review that condemns his directorial debut as a waste of film. I'm not talking about a good idea gone awry, I'm referring to something that's rotten to the core. Read full review