It's hard to know where to begin with The Family Tree; to adequately describe one its failures is to ignore another, equal if not greater failure. Tree is so miscalculated on such an atomic level that it nearly defies assessment, but if you were to identify its greatest offenses, you would have to separate what was inept from what was just plain insidious. The look and tone of The Family Tree are so completely off as to make it nearly unwatchable, but it is the film's insulated perspective on the world that makes it truly embarrassing.
In the opening scene, Eric Burnett (Max Thieriot) delivers a voice-over monologue deliberately evocative of that beginning American Beauty (even the family's name, Burnett to Burnham, feels like an homage), played over scenes in the coming film. Immediately after, Jack Burnett (Dermot Mulroney) delivers the film's first actual line of dialogue: "I don't think that we're dysfunctional." What follows over the next 90 minutes is presumably meant to refute that, but it accidentally affirms it. The Burnetts are not dysfunctional; nowhere here is the abuse or repression that the term is meant to imply. They are, however, petty, childish, and selfish in the way that indie cinema obligates them to be. "Dysfunction", also in the tagline, is synonymous with "quirk", another word is used in the first minute of the movie.
Eric spends much of the film doing a passable Wes Bentley impression, staring glassy-eyed while displaying interest in little other than Christianity (embodied here by stoic gun nut Keith Carradine) and a small handgun that he stashes in his bedroom. The only one attempting to bring him out of his morose funk is his sister Kelly (Britt Robertson), who drops little nuggets like "do you think mom still blows dad" in order to register something like an emotional reaction. Jack isn't much better, his only satisfaction coming from fantasizing about sex with coworker Alicia (Christina Hendricks) while selling his soul in order to get a promotion.
But the real downer is Bunnie (Hope Davis), who isn't idiosyncratic so much as just nasty, needlessly calling her daughter a whore and coldly deflecting sex with her husband in her first few scenes. By comparison, everyone else in the rest of the movie wouldn't stand out in a knitting circle, but so much of the film's negative energy is directed at her that it's hard to believe that the writers were able to stand writing dialogue for her. In midst of sleeping with their neighbor Simon (Chi McBride), her head is knocked backwards into the wall, giving her a concussion and erasing her memory of the better part of her marriage. She soon forgets that she was having an affair, but also totally reverses her personality, becoming pleasant and accommodating, which translates into giving her husband blow jobs in public places.
This would seem to be a major plot point, and might, under certain circumstances, be intriguing, but it’s really only window dressing in a plotline that also rotates through a strangled high schooler who dangles from the tree in the front yard for the entirety of the film, two gang bangers, and a lesbian teacher having an affair with one of her students. To say that the film’s minority characters (not to mention its women) are isolated and demonized would be an understatement, but potentially more offensive are the protagonists with whom the film insists we should find sympathy. The teenagers are so broadly sketched and uninteresting that it’s nearly impossible to identify with them, and they express such self-absorbed sentiments that it can’t help draw attention that they reflect the nightmare of middle class angst films absorption with themselves; the self-pity, the inability to recognize their great fortune, the insistence that any of their problems are that interesting. The Family Tree may be a minor effort by any standard, but it’s discouraging in a way that typically only a great director’s work can be.
BONUS FEATURES
There are two trailers (red and green band), a making of, and some on set footage.
"The Family Tree" is on sale November 22, 2011 and is rated R. Comedy, Drama. Directed by Vivi Friedman. Written by Mark Lisson. Starring Bow Wow, Chi McBride, Christina Hendricks, Dermot Mulroney, Hope Davis, Jane Seymour, Keith Carradine, Selma Blair, Britt Roberts, Max Thieriot, Rachel Leigh Cook.
