The Family Tree (2020) | Film Review

To paraphrase the late, great Rick James: nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Nostalgia is just that, isn’t it? A drug to be controlled and monitored and handed out in small doses, and it comes in a rainbow of flavors. Flavors like places, times, things, and to a lot of us, pop culture. Nostalgia is something we all seem to feed off of to the detriment of our growth or even become addicted to it. So, when presented with an opportunity to watch a movie filmed in the country of my birth, The Republic of Panama, during a time that always felt magical, Christmas, I know that my addiction to nostalgia was the driving force behind it. Now the question becomes, how did The Family Tree feed my homesick nostalgic needs.

Let me set the stage for you.

We meet Victor and Alina (Keith Roenke and Anaïs Lucia), two friends who started as something more but decided that friendship was the better route for them. Alina is going through a hard time so after a night out, Victor hires a singing telegram to boost her spirits. At this point, we are introduced to Roy (Michael Joseph Nelson), the singing telegram guy who also happens to be homeless and undocumented. Victor and Alina are taken with Roy so in the Christmas spirit, they invite him in for awkward drinks, give him a huge tip and then send him on his way. You can tell Roy doesn’t know what situational awareness is because as he is walking through a park, at night, while leafing exaggeratedly through the fat stack of cash his new friends just gave him, a homeless guy pops out of a bush, brains him and steals his cash. Fortunately, Victor stumbles on the crumpled mass of dope in a singing telegram Santa outfit that is Roy and takes him in. Roy is out like a light for two days, in a stranger’s home, who has undressed him, and no one thinks this is weird enough to hit the brakes yet.

Eventually, Roy wakes up and repays Victor’s kindness with breakfast and more stories about how unlucky he is. Roy is homeless because his girlfriend was bad with money, he can’t go to the hospital or the cops about his assault because he doesn’t want to get deported and he just doesn’t know what to do with himself. Victor, after another full day and some random chicha drinking, arrives at an epiphany. His revelation leads to a myriad of obstacles and potentially a full-blown love triangle of sorts. Believe it or not, things continue to grow more complicated even after these developments.

The story is a little all over the place, but the concept has some real promise. What the script needs most is more development. It needs to cook for a little longer and learn how to trust itself a little more. With some better dialog development and a deeper fleshing out of the characters, The Family Tree could sit comfortably with great stories of equal ideologies such as Chasing Amy or Imagine Me & You, two stories that work with gender and love exceedingly well.

The story isn’t the sole issue. The cast is filled with actors who are ACTING! Or they are just saying lines with very little in-between that would qualify as a skilled performance. The production suffers from poor ADR, sound design that takes a walk and talk on a sidewalk and turns it into a traverse through a jungle and mumble. At times I was turning up the volume and then lowering it as fast as I could so I did not suffer hearing loss. Dissolves were overly used creating that double exposure illusion where two things are being shown on the screen at the same time, and the simplest shot of a man sitting in contemplation in a park turns into a scene with more cuts than are ever deemed necessary.

So here is the thing. I want to tell you that watching this movie wasn’t a good time. However, I can’t. You see, much like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room or the classic Troll 2, The Family Tree – when watched with the right people – could be one of those things that a group of friends can bond over. The film’s absurdity is laughable and fun. You may find yourself laughing or cringing or cracking jokes at all the wrong moments and it feels kind of good.

For me, the movie was going to be a walk down memory lane. I got to see Ancon Hill, where my dad put up radio towers and we would run around getting chased by snakes. The Hotel Panama, where my family had a fitness club and would spend nearly every day while my mother worked. Amazing shots of the bat crap insane Nativity Scenes that people would build to celebrate Christmas. I got to see it all for brief glimpses which were my nostalgic hope for the movie, but in the grand scheme of things, The Family Tree left me instead hoping that somewhere, there is an AA meeting for nostalgia.