Josh Gad Leads So-So Dramedy

If pop culture is to be believed, nothing good has ever come from a couple dashing off to a cute little cabin in the woods. This year alone, the sly sci-fi Companion, Netflix’s drab dramedy The Four Seasons and the twisted Sundance rom-com Oh, Hi! have each taken turns considering the many, many different ways a weekend getaway might pressure-test a relationship, until fault lines become chasms big enough to swallow entire lives whole.

Adding to that collection now is Nora Kirkpatrick’s debut feature, A Tree Fell in the Woods, premiering at Tribeca. In the canon of vacation-set marriage exposés, it’s mid-tier, entertaining in parts but neither profound nor original enough to blaze any new trails. But in its epiphany that our most complicated relationships are the ones we have with ourselves, it delivers an intriguing if incomplete snapshot of Millennial anxiety.

A Tree Fell in the Woods

The Bottom Line

Fitfully amusing.

Venue: Tribeca Film Festival (Spotlight Narrative)
Cast: Josh Gad, Alexandra Daddario, Ashley Park, Daveed Diggs, Kevin Pollak
Director-screenwriter: Nora Kirkpatrick

Rated R,
1 hour 40 minutes

The falling tree of the title turns out to be very literal: In the first act, best friends Debs (Alexandra Daddario) and Mitch (Josh Gad) are nearly flattened while exploring the forest around the home they’ve rented for their “Christmas New Year’s thingamajigy weekend.” Exhilarated by their near-death experience, they rush back to regale their spouses with the tale, only to spy through the window Josh (Daveed Diggs) and Melanie (Ashley Park) in flagrante delicto.

Mitch, dreading a future in which “each one of us ends up depressed, angry, alone, masturbating on the couch,” prefers to say nothing. Debs, reluctantly, plays along through gritted teeth. Nevertheless, it’s only a matter of time before a violent snowstorm traps the quartet inside, with nothing to do but wallow in their insecurities and trade furious invectives — well, that, and drown their sorrows in the ancient, mysterious, possibly slightly magical bottles of moonshine recovered from the basement, to mildly comic effect.

Kirkpatrick, whose credits include Prime Video’s Daisy Jones & The Six, resists casting any of her four leads in roles as easy as victim or villain. As the couples separate to argue in private or individuals retreat to lick their wounds, the writer-director periodically cuts between them, so that their conversations or coping mechanisms become a single symphony of hurt and anger and misunderstanding. Sure, Melanie and Josh are in the wrong, and Mitch and Debs are right to be mad — but, the film makes clear, each has their part to play in everything that’s gone wrong.

Which is not to say that the movie’s understanding of all four is equally sharp, or equally sympathetic. Its most lucid and least likable portrayal is of Mitch, who feels taken advantage of by the women in his life (namely Melanie, but also Debs); Gad’s exhaustingly showy performance adds to the sense that he’s one of those stereotypical “nice guys” who turns every act of kindness into a self-sacrificing spectacle.

On the flip side, Park delivers the film’s most unexpectedly funny and oddly moving turn as a woman cracking under the dissatisfactions of a marriage built more around both parties’ ideas of what they should want than what they actually do.

The script is less successful at dissecting Debs and Josh’s relationship, favoring her indignation over his fury to the point that when he finally does open up about his anxieties late in the film, it feels like we’re only now meeting him for the first time. Nor do Daddario and Diggs share the kind of chemistry that might let us understand what drew them together in the first place, though they do share a couple of eloquently written, tenderly acted exchanges in the back half.

But if A Tree Fell in the Woods is only fitfully persuasive in its excavations of the resentments that can build over a long-term relationship — and if the deployment of a vaguely magical potion to get there seems a tad too convenient — its shrewdest observation is that none of these grudges can be separated from the ones the characters hold against their own selves. No longer young but not quite middle-aged (the characters are in their 30s, though some of the actors are older), they find themselves suspended between fading promise and dull reality, between the futures they’d imagined and the ones they’re settling into, between the people they hoped they might be and the ones they’re actually becoming.

Debs, an author struggling to live up to the promise of her debut novel, is married to a photographer whose reputation outpaces his talent. Mitch is a successful banker who hates his job and the life it’s bought him, with a wife who does not understand him. For all four, the idea that they might really be stuck with these lives is such a bitter pill to swallow that perhaps it’s no wonder they’re compelled to do something — anything — to put off the decades of disappointment and disillusionment they see looming before them.

At one point, Mitch even drunkenly floats the idea that the betrayal might turn out to be a blessing in disguise. “We saw it,” he slurs, “and it saved us from the rest of our lives.” Debs, understandably, isn’t buying it. But sometimes, the only way out of a hellish weekend in the woods is through. And sometimes, the only way to cut to the truth is to knock down all the bullshit surrounding it first.