Trees Lounge

His face carved like a weatherbeaten old rock set against the world, his hair a mass of tangled white, Billy the barfly gazes languidly through watery eyes at a point fixed nowhere in particular as a hand emerges from off-camera and half-fills a tumbler with Wild Turkey. Eyeing the unseen bartender, Billy gestures furiously when the bartender stops short of the brim. The glass is filled, the bartender takes one of the notes lying on the bar, and Billy drains the glass in a long, grave, practised manner, underscored by the crooning tones of a nostalgic lounge ballad, defiant, resigned and heavy-hearted by turns.

The title scene sets the perfect tone for Steve Buscemi's meandering Trees Lounge; a wistful, semi-autobiographical character-study centring on the eponymous Long Island bar and the assortment of souls that swing through its doors. Written and directed by Buscemi, the film is a genuine slice of Long Island life, based around its shiftless lead character Tommy Basilio, also played by Buscemi and inspired by his own extended search for the spark of vocation during his early twenties. Sacked for "borrowing" money for a Las Vegas jaunt from the garage owned by his boss and ex-best friend Rob (Anthony LaPaglia), to whom he has also lost his long-suffering and now-pregnant girlfriend Theresa (Elizabeth Bracco), Tommy fills his days occasionally looking for work but mostly fraternising with the Trees cast of regulars; veteran Billy, barfly couple Stan and Jackie, barmaid Connie and a new addition, troubled family-man Mike (Daniel Boone Jr.). Following the untimely death of his Uncle Al, Tommy takes over driving his ice-cream truck, crossing paths with Theresa's explosive brother-in-law Jerry (Daniel Baldwin) and developing an increasingly complicated and precarious relationship with Jerry's coquettish daughter Debbie (Chloe Sevigny). A perceptive, low-fi patchwork of character and comedy laced with a generous shot of last-orders melancholy and a chaser of barstool blues, Trees Lounge establishes Buscemi, already the undisputed de rigeur actor of independent filmmaking, as a director of equal vintage.

Unfolding in a series of episodic scenes whose meandering narratives mirror Tommy's indolent lifestyle, Trees Lounge, with its echoes of Cassavetes and the slacker sedentary vogue, is essentially a peripatetic story about being lost. Tommy is the culmination of the deadbeats, down-and-outs and lowlife characters in which Buscemi seems to have cornered the market; not yet as weaselly, unscrupulous, or immoral as most of them, but certainly hovering at the crossroads. The bar, meanwhile, a long-standing literary and cinematic setting for American storytelling, acts as a place of escape for the characters, an emergency exit from the troubles and frustrations of the outside world, a cocoon where no questions get asked and no answers are needed. Characters move through the bar to escape the responsibilities and realities of the adult world, be they the pressures of work (Samuel L. Jackson as removal man), of motherhood (the girl Tommy tries to pick up who turns out to be a single mother), of family (Jerry and Mike), and even of death (Tommy and his cousin wind up at the Trees following Uncle Al's funeral). Where other characters are always passing through, crucially, the three regulars Billy, Jackie and Stan hardly move at all; when Billy does, halfway through the film, it's because Tommy is literally carrying him home after close. Tommy, meanwhile, moves around, but always without direction and never quite seeming to know the way, whether walking the streets, driving his car or the ice-cream truck; and of course, Tommy always ends up back where he started - at the Trees. Near the end of the film, confiding to Theresa in hospital after having her baby, Tommy delivers his mot juste: "I don't feel anything...except lost." Stagnation, or directionlessness, like the meandering narrative, becomes symbolic of a wider sense of Tommy having lost the way, reflected in the non-sequiturs and dead-end conversations of Buscemi's deadpan bar-room dialogue:

TOMMY
Hey Bill...did you ever kill anyone?
BILLY (drunk)
What kind of an asshole question is that?
TOMMY
You know...in Korea?
BILLY
What Korea?

Tommy is also stuck somewhere between the past and future - between his former self, the energetic clown on Theresea's Christmas video and the Munchkin-song singing Tommy of Debbie's youth whom we glimpse playing occasional practical jokes in the bar - and his own undecided future. Trees Lounge contains many parallels and juxtapositions thrown up by the collage narrative style which cast different lights on Tommy's situation; between singledom and the various married couples, some happy, like Rob and Theresa, some not, like Mike and his wife, some neither, like Jackie and Stan; between age and youth, particularly the parallel crossroads that characterise both Debbie's adolescence and Tommy's mid-twenties; and between the world outside moving on and the world inside the Trees perpetually the same.

Ultimately, Trees Lounge is a film about growing up. Tommy still exists in the adolescent world avoiding responsibility for his actions, stepping out of life's way rather than squaring up, still letting himself get "kicked around for laughs", always claiming a bum rap, a raw deal, a tough break. Life is a bitch sometimes, it rarely turns out the way we want, and it never shows up to answer for itself; but running away, like Mike, or simply disappearing like Billy, doesn't take any of the problems away. Real pain - like Debbie's, and Tommy's own following Theresa's final rejection of him, and the very real hurt he experiences when Jerry finally catches up with him - is what tells you that it's time to keep moving on. For all the trials and tribulations of Mike's marriage, Buscemi suggests they'll move upstate; Debbie moves to the big city; Theresa and Rob have a baby; open-ended resolutions, perhaps, but with the promise of new beginnings. Buscemi's final image of Tommy, meanwhile, is very specific. Back at the Trees Lounge, Billy having collapsed and been taken to hospital, the regulars pontificate about going to see him, but, of course, hardly move from their seats except to play his favourite song like a requiem - the lounge song from the beginning, The Inkspots' I Understand (Exactly How You Feel). Suddenly we realise Tommy has assumed Billy's seat, the heir apparent to his barstool throne. Tommy has now become Billy. We haven't moved anywhere at all, while the song's lyrics begin to echo like the soundtrack to Tommy's life: "I understand / And darling you are not to blame / If when we kiss it's not the same / I understand / It's not your fault."

Crucially, perhaps, as in the other stories, Buscemi offers just a chink of hope: Tommy goes to down his shot of Wild Turkey, but stops, draws back and sits instead in silence, staring bewildered into the middle distance. For Tommy, and for the rest of us, Buscemi doesn't try to provide any easy answers, but Trees Lounge still contains more integrity, intelligence and comic sincerity in its single shot glass than a whole brewery of Hollywood blockbuster, and Buscemi's Animal Factory, a prison drama adapted from the novel by 'Mr Blue' Eddie Bunker, promises to continue his directorial development. Better make mine a double.

Reviewed by Oliver Berry