By Walker Zupp
The Aokigahara Forest in Japan is ‘famed’ for its high suicide rate, that is, how many people travel to the forest every year to kill themselves. It is a dense forest on the north-western side of Mount Fuji, which, beneath all that lush vegetation, is essentially 12 square miles of hardened lava. Moreover, there seems to be a Western fetish with the forest; an obsession about all that is spooky on Mount Fuji, and the Japanese culture itself.
My first ‘experience’ of the forest was a VICE documentary called ‘Suicide Forest in Japan’ (2012). It is exceptional in the VICE canon in that it is profoundly moving, and as far from sensationalist as you can get. Ending on an oddly hopeful note, their forest guide finds a bunch of flowers at the foot of a tree, where (we assume) someone hanged themselves, their body having decomposed some time ago. ‘You think you die alone, but that’s not true,’ he says. ‘Nobody is alone in this world.’ It’s a shattering ending to a polite and erudite piece of documentary filmmaking: tough when it needs to be, but always on a tender note. But that was way back in 2012—Some years later, in 2015, I heard that Gus Van Sant had made a film that was set in the Aokigahara Forest. Naturally, I was quite eager to see the film, and did finally get around to watching it.
‘The Sea of Trees’ (2015) is about an American man (Matthew McCounaughey) who travels to the forest to commit suicide. He sits on a rock, takes out his pills (we’re never terribly sure what they are: suicide pills, I’m guessing) and takes a few. Then he’s rudely interrupted by a Japanese man (Ken Watanabe) who is trying to do the same thing – or is he? Anyway, they basically stop each other from committing suicide and discuss together how their lives have brought them to this point. McCounaughey—aided by a tsunami of flashbacks—talks about his wife (Naomi Watts) who suffers from alcoholism.
Let’s get something straight: I hate ‘The Sea of Trees’. I hate this film more than any other film I’ve ever seen, and I don’t think it’s going to get any better with age. It is an appalling movie – morally bankrupt, dull, stupid; the scene where the two men take refuge in a tent and try to contact the park rangers on a broken walkie-talkie is one of the most unintentionally funny things I have ever seen. Prior to watching this film, I’d never seen Ken Watanabe cry; I hope to never experience that again.
Gus Van Sant’s main achievement with ‘The Sea of Trees’ is that he manages to make you laugh at people who, were they not in a Gus Van Sant movie, would be the last people to laugh at. Like, really down the bottom of the list. Naomi Watts is the single most unconvincing alcoholic in a film, ever. Her performance is truly awful, which is a shame because I like Naomi Watts; she’s probably one of the best actors working today. And yet she proves that even the best may fall by the sword of Chris Sparling: the script (by Chris Sparling) is, as with all bad movies or plays, the machine gun that eradicates the camel’s body. I hate ‘The Sea of Trees’ because I hate the script, which is perhaps the most loathsome piece of literature ever written; it is immature, imperialist trash of the highest order. There is no love or hope in this script; there is only cheap hate. For lack of a better phrase, it sucks the big one.
Runtime and quality are not synchronized. ‘The Sea of Trees’ is 106 minutes. VICE’s ‘Suicide Forest in Japan’ is 21 minutes and 8 seconds. I rest my case.
‘The Sea of Trees’ has stuck with me, however, or clearly. Mainly because it represents a trend one can now see in young filmmakers’ work. My job as a pre-screener at the Bermuda International Film Festival (BIFF) entails my watching a lot of short films. But the overriding factor in these short films is that despite their technical virtuosity, and often their photogenic beauty, they are totally soulless. The term I use the most is ‘morally repugnant’. What’s more, the less photogenic movies i.e. the ones that have spent more time writing their script than framing their shots, become the overlooked films, or, they are immediately written off because they haven’t been shot by Kasper Tuxen.
(Note: Kasper Tuxen’s cinematography in ‘The Sea of Trees’ is phenomenal. It is a beautiful film to look at. And yet, I hate it.)
There are a lot of factors going on at work in the industry: the availability of technology, the sheer interest in film, the almost endless social reasons for making a movie these days; those are all fine, but it doesn’t explain why so many films now are morally repugnant like ‘The Sea of Trees,’ or, failing that, unengaged in that very human way that makes art not only accessible, but also plausible in the first place.
Gus Van Sant’s follow-up to his 2015 disaster was his 2018 film ‘Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot’. I avoided seeing this for some time, fearing that it would be ‘The Sea of Trees: Part Deux’. Based on a true story, however, his newest film follows alcoholic John Callahan (Joaquin Phoenix) through his near-fatal car accident at 21, his subsequent paralyzed state and continued drinking, and his eventual sobering-up and redemption as a prolific satirical cartoonist. This is a very good film; certainly one of the best I’ve seen about addiction. The performances are splendid, the cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt is arresting (but, crucially, complements the story and characterization) and the script by Gus Van Sant is heart-breaking, funny, subversive—Everything a good script should be. I think it more than makes up for ‘The Sea of Trees,’ but it does go to show how much a director can screw up, whether they be making short films, or features. But there is something happening; an obsession with surface, or, an allowance for/acceptance of moral repugnance. It needs to stop.
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