‘You don’t go to work every day. You go to a bar every day…’
There are certain actors that act as a seal of approval in terms of quality. I’ll watch anything with Matt Damon in it. Ed Norton and Sam Rockwell likewise. Steve Buscemi is knocking on that door as well, despite his constant appearance in shitty Adam Sandler movies. Trees Lounge is Buscemi’s debut feature as a writer/director, and it earns its place in what is one of cinema’s most illustrious careers.
Tommy (Buscemi) is a down-on-his-luck barfly struggling to stay afloat after losing his job as a mechanic. He spends most of his days drinking shitty beer and doing even shittier coke in a dive bar in a small blue collar town. Trees Lounge is the story of Tommy, but it is also the story of Mike (Mark Boone Junior) an unhappily married drug addict, and of Rob (Anthony LaPaglia) Tommy’s old boss who took away his girl and his job. It’s the story of Stan (Rockets Redglare) and Jackie (Suzanne Shepherd), an aging couple who spend every waking moment sat at the bar playing cards. Most of all, Trees Lounge is the story of every small town loser who ever spent an evening staring down the barrel of a whiskey bottle with life’s responsibilities screaming at them from some far away place. It’s a story about life and about death and about how drink sits somewhere in the middle of those two finite spaces.
Buscemi draws from his own life experiences to paint a compelling picture of how easy it is to slip into alcoholism. And how that doesn’t always look like some terrible slide into an unspeakable abyss, but more just a series of poor decisions and a little bad luck. Everyone has met someone like Tommy in their life. I’ve known many of them. Heck, I think I was even a Tommy myself for a while there. Trees Lounge captures that feeling of hopelessness mixed with camaraderie perfectly, and in turn, it made me long for my own bar days. Not too much, of course, but maybe a little.
Trees Lounge isn’t really offering us anything new, Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski were both singing this same song years before Buscemi added his voice to the chorus, but the fact that it can even be mentioned in the same breath as them indicates how successful this movie is. An underrated gem.