Cannes Report: Boos for McConaughey's Mawkish 'Sea of Trees'

Director Gus Van Sant came into Cannes with an excellent festival pedigree: His 2003 Columbine-inspired drama Elephant won the Palme d’Or and Best Director prize. The reception for this year’s in-competition movie The Sea of Trees is, however, looking to be frostier. At a Friday evening press screening, the drama’s end credits were greeted with a round of boos from a portion of the audience. The ensuing reviews have been mostly pans so far. Can it be all that bad? Yes unfortunately, it can.

Also read: Why Kristen Stewart was booed at Cannes (and other shocking moments)

The Sea of Trees finds the often indie Van Sant squarely back in mainstream movie mode. It stars Matthew McConaughey as a hollowed-out adjunct professor named Arthur who books a one-way ticket to Tokyo with plans to kill himself in the Aokigahara forest around Mt. Fuji, a hushed, impenetrable woodland known as a frequent suicide spot. Just as he’s settling in to down his bottle of pills, a Japanese businessman (Ken Watanabe) with slashed wrists staggers into view. Takumi is already regretting his own suicide attempt — he’s desperate to escape the forest alive, and Arthur is moved to help him. As the two wander the woods looking for the trail, we get flashbacks to Arthur’s troubled marriage to his wife, Joan (Naomi Watts), which led him to this haunted place.

The scenes between Joan and Arthur are meant to be searing, but there’s nothing in particular in the screenplay to distinguish them beyond a generic hectoring wife and sullen husband. The two move from the clichés of a crumbling marriage to the clichés of a cancer scare without leaving much of an impression. (To be fair, that’s probably a spoiler, but like most of the movie’s big reveals, you’ll see it coming.) Meanwhile, back in the forest, Takumi and Arthur’s journey lurches from spooky horror to survival thriller to grief therapy as Takumi becomes a platitude-spouting magical Japanese man counseling the westerner through the ways of the afterlife.

The movie’s final act brings a flood of eye-rolling coincidences and knock-off M. Night Shyamalan plot twists. Van Sant aims for profound, but hits somewhere closer to cheap and treacly, and it’s all underlined with an intrusive score that telegraphs every emotion. There are some weighty, troubling mysteries in the suicide forest, but The Sea of Trees isn’t going to offer much enlightenment.