Eye.net 2001

Tree's a Crowd

by Adam Nayman

It's not directed by Atom Egoyan or David Cronenberg, and it's not appreciably quirky, but Toronto filmmaker William Phillips' stripped-down feature debut, Treed Murray, is vital, stand-alone Canadian filmmaking. As a primer for aspiring young directors who want to tell compelling, original stories on limited budgets, it's invaluable -- it illustrates that the most spectacular pyrotechnics are often of the verbal variety.

"When we were designing the film, we had a few basic rules, like keeping it low-budget, keeping it simple and keeping it fast," says writer/director Phillips during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival. "The way we saw it, there's gonna be some people at the bottom of the tree and a guy up in the tree, and that was going to be the story."

"So what you did," interjects star David Hewlett, waving an admonishing finger, "is you instead went and made Die Hard in a tree."

Phillips and Hewlett are old friends -- Phillips worked as second-unit director on Vincenzo Natali's memorable 1997 techno-thriller Cube, while Hewlett was the film's leading man.

"We didn't spend much time together on Cube," says Phillips, "because they didn't let second-unit directors hang around with the cast."

"Actually, when you were on the set was the one time I got hurt," retorts Hewlett. "They had us jumping through these little doors on the set, and I wasn't sure how to do it. So you just said, 'Jump,' and so there I went: jump, smack -- ouch."

Given this revelation, it's remarkable that Hewlett would put his physical well-being in Phillips' hands again. Which is exactly what he does in Treed Murray, spending almost the entire 90 minutes of the film stuck in a tree.

And he's really up there. Aside from some close-ups filmed in post-production, Hewlett gave his performance as the eponymous Murray from a dizzying altitude of 16 feet from his co-stars. ("Write down that it was 24," Hewlett insists, "because that sounds much scarier.") The complexities of this set-up necessitated a lot of takes over the compressed 19-day shoot and some very careful editing. Though the initial idea was simplicity itself, says Phillips, "in retrospect, it was very difficult, and I don't think I'll try to simplify in such a complicated way ever again."

But it's these same dynamics of the simple and the complicated that make Treed Murray such riveting viewing. Though the action never leaves the one location, it's a tricky, totally unpredictable movie. The film opens briskly, with the sleek ad exec Murray losing his way in a large municipal park, where he's surprised by a group of teenage thugs. When he refuses to hand over any money, the kids give chase, and Murray desperately climbs a large tree to hide.

He almost gets away with it, but he's left his briefcase at the bottom, and one of the gang members spots it. Once he's been discovered, Murray -- who is shrewd in a scraping, Darwinian sort of way -- must not only fend off the gang physically, but also try to bargain, plead or scheme his way out of his predicament.

"The plot came from a series of news events about swarmings," says Phillips. "All you need in a situation like that is four or six teenagers, and they can easily take one man down. So I started to think, 'What would I do?'"

What Murray does is resort to every dirty psychological trick in the book, picking on individual gang members' emotional weaknesses in an attempt to split them apart. The group's charismatic leader, Shark (Cle Bennett), is no pushover -- he's an articulate, impassioned advocate for the underclass, and he hates everything the perfectly coiffed man in the tree stands for. It's an evenly matched battle, and it's hard to recall another film that generates such sustained suspense on the sheer logistics of escape.

Hewlett's performance is superb, especially considering the duress under which it was given. Murray never once looks comfortable in the tree, and Hewlett eschews all vanity in communicating the character's terror and blind, grasping anger. The irony, of course, is that Murray's job, as Hewlett puts it, is "to know these kids and to sell them stuff they don't want and don't need."

In this case, he's trying to sell them on the fact that he's not the guy they should take their aggression out on. But, as Phillips' observant script deftly illustrates, the high-living Murray is the perfect scapegoat for the gang's frustrations. Even before he got stuck in the tree, he was perched tauntingly beyond their reach, and now they have a real chance to bring him down to their brutal level of reality.

The "Die Hard in a tree" synopsis notwithstanding, Treed Murray is a difficult film to classify, although its creator sees it as an essentially Torontonian fable. "There's no other city besides Toronto where the story could have unfolded the way it does in this movie," says Phillips. "In an American city, the kids would be armed to the hilt, and it would be over in 30 seconds."

Hewlett agrees. "This is definitely a Canadian film, but not in the sense that it's 'not American.'"

Given the state of Hollywood product lately, "not American" might seem high praise for Treed Murray, but it's even better than that. Let's lose the "Canadian" qualifier and just call it one of the best films of the year.