The Family Tree Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.0

The Family Tree Blu-ray Movie Review

The Outer Limb-its.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 27, 2011

Those of us in the United States have just experienced our annual reacquaintance with everything that drives us crazy about our families. It must be some kind of cosmic joke that this event is called Thanksgiving, for the holiday seems to often be a breeding ground for dysfunction where everything from differing political opinions to rooting for various opposing football teams can bring out the petulant child in just about everyone. There’s probably no one alive who can’t recount some anecdote about their own family’s foibles, and more often than not any given individual will be convinced that their particular anecdote is the be-all end-all of family dysfunction. To those people, I simply say, spend a few minutes with the members of The Family Tree, and you will almost certainly be feeling better about your own familial situation. Family dysfunction is of course a filmic trope as old as the hills, and it shows no signs of slowing down, rearing its semi-ugly head in such relatively recent films as various as American Beauty to Little Miss Sunshine to Super 8. The trials and tribulations of living in close quarters with those who share either the bonds of matrimony or actual DNA can’t be overstated, despite the fact the more often than not filmmakers like to take the problems to hyperbolic extremes, something most certainly the case with The Family Tree. This is a film which absolutely exults in darker than black humor, but it’s also a film that traffics in a certain kind of audience schadenfreude, where a lot of the laughter isn’t necessarily based in the characters themselves but stems from viewers responding to the fact that their personal straits aren’t half as bad as what’s shown in the film.

The Burnett family consists of father Jack (Dermot Mulroney), a kind of middle management schlub who meanders through a mostly meaningless existence; mother Bunnie (Hope Davis), a do-gooder whose two main purposes in life seem to be organizing charity fundraisers and shtupping her next door neighbor, Simon (Chi McBride); daughter Kelly (Brittany Robertson), a typically sullen teenage girl who likes to provoke people; and son Eric (Max Thieriot), the putative narrator of the film and a kid whose twin loves are the Bible and guns, not necessarily in that order. The Family Tree plays on its title right off the bat by first introducing a high school voyeur jock who climbs the tree in the Burnett’s front yard to spy on Bunnie and Kelly as they sleep and who quickly manages to kill himself in the process, hanging from an upper limb where his body is hidden by leaves, where it will remain for most of the rest of the film. We also get a fitful therapy session with all of the Burnetts, very reminiscent of a similar scene in the tonally comparable The Ref, where about the only thing the family can agree on is how stupid the therapist is.

The Family Tree starts out winningly enough, and indeed seems to be on track to be scabrously funny and ruthless with regard to its many characters. But the film goes surprisingly flaccid rather quickly when Bunnie’s secret assignation with Simon leads to a head injury which gives her short term memory loss, meaning the years of hatred and resentment she has built up with regard to Jack and her children simply vanish overnight. That leaves the rest of the film floundering for some comedic momentum, as suddenly everything is bright and cheery with Bunnie, but virtually everyone else in the film is a walking disaster story. The Family Tree also has way too many characters and subplots for its own good, and certainly for its quite brief running time. Just a (partial) listing of actors and their roles gives some idea of this glut of competing stories: Keith Carradine is the pot smoking Reverend of the local church who encourages Eric in his marksmanship skills; Selma Blair is a lesbian teacher involved with a crippled student who also has designs on Kelly; Christina Hendricks is a secretary (yikes!) at Jack’s company; Gabrielle Anwar is a ruthless efficiency expert at the same company who is cutting jobs right and left and who seems (rather improbably) to have had an affair at one point with Jack; and Bow Wow is a hapless wannabe thug who meets Simon in the slammer and then decides to organize a home invasion which serves as part of the film’s frenetic denouement. This brief listing doesn’t even get into quasi-cameos from such actors as Rachael Leigh Cook as the therapist or Jane Seymour as Bunnie’s mother.

The film would have been much better—and much funnier—had it had the courage of its initial convictions and simply stuck with the Burnetts through their reprehensible dysfunction. The film wants to trade in the darkness for something approaching light, especially with regard to a bizarre coda involving Eric’s shooting skills, and because of that tonal imbalance, The Family Tree simply never feels as ridiculously mean as it should. The weird dearth of consistent tone combined with the surfeit of characters competing for screen time in Mark LIsson’s too fussy screenplay is at least partially ameliorated by a spry and fanciful job by director Vivi Friedman, who paints the Stepford like enclave where the Burnetts reside in pretty primary colors which are often seen from oddly skewed angles. Friedman has a fine visual sense which makes The Family Tree seem better than it really is, and she also elicits uniformly good work from a game (and obviously large and eclectic) cast. But ultimately this is a film that could and should have been nastier with a keener satiric edge.

The Family Tree Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Blu-ray of The Family Tree exhibits a peculiar error where blacks are at 6% dark grey and whites are at 92% light grey. While these anomalies may not be noticeable to many, take them into account when reading the overall video quality comments below.

The Family Tree is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Entertainment One with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. The visual aspect of this film is one of its most appealing attributes and this high definition presentation pops very nicely all around, with excellent sharpness and color despite some occasionally pushed contrast. The film has the smooth textureless look of having been shot on HD video but I haven't been able to confirm that. That said, despite that smooth look, there's excellent fine detail on display throughout the film and colors are really nicely saturated. No compression artifacts of any import were noticed other than some very minor crush in a couple of nighttime scenes (the early scene in the tree with the voyeur is a prime example).

The Family Tree Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Family Tree features both a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix and a lossy standard Dolby Digital 5.1 mix and it's somewhat telling that there isn't a whole bunch of difference between the two mixes. This is quite simply mostly a dialogue driven film, with only a few bombastic sonic moments, courtesy of a couple of well placed gunshots. The DTS track has a slight (actually kind of surprisingly slight) edge in terms of more fulsome low end, but the difference between the DTS track and the Dolby track is really remarkably negligible. That said, fidelity is very strong and there's some decent surround activity throughout the film, notably in a fun carnival scene, and later during the frenetic climax when people are screaming and yelling at each other and a series of crazy events catapults into cartoonish violence.

The Family Tree Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Theatrical Green Band Trailer (HD; 2:29)
• Theatrical Red Band Trailer (HD; 2:02)
• Building a Family Tree Featurette (1080i; 10:13) is the requisite set of cast and crew interviews interspersed with scenes being shot and final cut footage.
• On the Set (1080i; 9:47) is simple behind the scenes stuff like make-up being applied and shots being lit and filmed.

The Family Tree Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Family Tree starts out just fine and it seems we're on course for a really ruthless deconstruction of a typically dysfunctional suburban family. But then the film goes fairly far afield when Bunnie has her accident and can't remember what her issues are, leaving the rest of the film teetering uneasily between the fairly nasty ambience set up in the opening scenes and a more feel good approach that is distinctly at odds with The Family Tree's supposed black comedy. This is gray comedy at best, beige comedy at worst, and it's really too bad, for the film features an amazing cast and Friedman is obviously a director with a lot of talent and flair. This is certainly not bad enough to merit outright rejection, but it's overall a lost opportunity that probably only merits an evening's rental for those who like various cast members.