‘The Sea of Trees’ lands with a thud

CANNES: On paper, it looked enticing: A high-stakes drama of love and loss by Gus Van Sant starring Oscar winner Matthew McCon-aughey and Naomi Watts and mostly set in Japan.
But “The Sea of Trees,” premiering Saturday in competition for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, landed with a thud at its press previews, garnering the first big boos of this year’s edition.
Critics later called it “long-winded,” “sticky and gooey” and culturally patronizing.
McConaughey’s career has been flying high since he bagged an Academy Award last year for “Dallas Buyers Club” and critical adulation for his role in the gritty television series “True Detective.” But his turn as Arthur, a bespectacled American mathematician who travels to Japan to commit suicide, looks to have been a career misstep. In the film, Arthur performs a Google search looking for “the perfect place to die” and ends up wandering through a dense forest near the foothills of Mount Fuji that attracts dozens of depressed people each year.
But before he can take his own life, he encounters Takumi (Ken Watanabe), a mysterious Japanese man who is injured and has lost his way. Through conversations and flashbacks, the film shows Arthur’s downward spiral back in Massachusetts with an alcoholic wife (Watts) and a stalling academic career.
Takumi leads Arthur on a rough hike that becomes a spiritual journey to examine where it all went wrong, complete with dialogue offering platitudes about science not offering all the answers to life’s questions. Plot twists that most viewers saw coming and a sentimental ending accompanied by swelling string music seemed to nix Van Sant’s shot at claiming a second Palme d’Or after his 2003 triumph with “Elephant.”
Critics savaged the latest by Van Sant, who has been nominated for two Oscars — for “Milk” and “Good Will Hunting” — and attracted a cult following with “Drugstore Cowboy” and “My Own Private Idaho.”
US movie website Indiewire said not even McConaughey could sustain the “mushy, amateurish story, which digs itself a deeper hole as it moves along.”
“The bulldozers are out and subtlety will be crushed until not a crumb remains,” French weekly L’Express said, calling its disappointment in the film “immense.”