A chamber piece about long-term relationship woes, Nora Kirkpatrick’s feature debut “A Tree Fell in the Woods” rests on the considered performances of its four lead actors, who play entwined couples considering their futures. However, this single-location comedy-drama seldom draws its power from the space in which it’s set. The comforts of its isolated mountain cabin not only refuse to enhance the bubbling pressures, but in many ways deflate them. The result is a film of casual observations from afar, and scenes strung together almost vignette-style, rather than unfolding as a result of toppling domestic dominoes.
Set in a cozy rented cabin, the New Year’s Eve getaway re-unites a pair of college best friends: novelist and editor Debs (Alexandra Daddario) and financier Mitch (Josh Gad). They each bring along their respective spouses, who’ve only met in passing: Debs is not-so-happily married to nature photographer Josh (Daveed Diggs), while Mitch is devoted to his happy-go-lucky housewife Melanie (Ashley Park), whose culinary enthusiasm has led to her own cookbook.
The friendship between Debs and Mitch is the movie’s strongest foundation, both because straight men and women are so rarely the center of platonic relationships in American cinema, and because Daddario and Gad sell their dynamic in delightful fashion. Watching them catch up on a snowy hike feels like peering in on a decades-long dynamic with its own secret language. When a tree falls and almost hits them, their first instinct is to return to the cabin and regale their partners with this crazy tale. In fact, their first instinct is to wonder whether their partners will believe them. But the film’s title — drawn from the thought experiment, “If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” — isn’t as literal as it seems.
If viewers have been conditioned to read the screen presence of a straight man and woman as inherently romantic — especially while hiking on a lush winter trail, arm in arm — this expectation is quickly subverted when Debs and Mitch return to the cabin earlier than expected, and peer in on their respective partners sleeping together. Oh dear. But while the furious Debs wants to burst in and confront them, Mitch takes a more curious route, begging her to forget the falling tree she’s just seen and heard, rather than blowing up both their relationships at once.
The subsequent dueling secrets — what Josh and Melanie think only they know, and what Debs and Mitch don’t let on that they also know — makes for an entertaining walk on eggshells at first, as the weekend plays out. As the couples spend time together in various permutations, tensions and frustrations boil over in propulsive scenes that threaten to bring down both houses of cards (assisted by Mitchell Yoshida’s nerve-wracking, “Magnolia”-esque score). However, rather than letting the discomforts of this premise fester, Kirkpatrick makes the curious decision to have the characters’ cards laid out on the table quickly and early on.
The foursome is soon snowed in, preventing them from leaving, and each character is quickly sequestered to their own quarters in the rustic duplex. What follows is largely a game of waiting around for tensions and egos to collide, though once they finally do, the actors all dig deep into the oddity of the situation in commendable ways. Unfortunately, it seldom feels like anything comes of the unspoken tensions between them — even when these are forced out in the open by a discovered bottle of spurious (and potentially hallucinogenic) Prohibition-era moonshine. While its consumption leads to a couple of fun visual flourishes, the release that follows makes any semblance of confrontation and introspection far too easy.
Watching “A Tree Fell in the Woods” usually involves waiting in anticipation of something explosive. However, except for Daddario’s performance — a remarkable balancing act of character quirks and holding things together as they fall apart — the viewing experience tends to be passive. There is also the question of when exactly the movie is set. Some design elements hint towards modernity, while others gesture towards a period piece a few decades in the past. However, there’s so little specificity to the characters’ careers or surrounding events, even on the precipice of a brand new calendar year, that the question is left floating in limbo.
The conclusions the film comes to are rooted, at least nominally, in catharsis, but this is far more often expressed in dialogue than through behavior, or tangible emotional transformation. It’s a wordy exercise, seldom supported by its visual storytelling, which is often littered with unmotivated dolly movements across nondescript space. It can be hard to tell what to think or feel at times, but the performers are usually funny enough to be distracting. In the ranks of festival indies that force old friends into close proximity for the holidays, you could do a whole lot worse.
variety.com
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