The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema, March 29-April 4
Trees Lounge (1996)
Directed by Steve Buscemi
Twenty years before the current TV show Horace and Pete, Louis C.K.’s brilliant, jet-black barroom satire in which he and Steve Buscemi star, came Trees Lounge, a low-rent gem written, directed by, and starring Buscemi—the prince of amiable sleaze, then just anointed by Fargo. His Tommy is an alcoholic flirt with louche charm. Tommy’s world, in a down-market Long Island town, remains defined by slights and jilts. An unemployed mechanic who takes on his dead uncle’s ice-cream truck route, he struggles through daylight cast on a stunted, ridiculous life—his ex-girlfriend pregnant by his former boss from whom he has stolen money, the temptations of a high-school friend’s teenage daughter (Chloë Sevigny), the beating the friend administers when Tommy keeps her out all night—to get to the eponymous tavern and drink as hard as he can with a menagerie of fellow black-out drunks and losers. Trees Lounge is masterfully poised between farce and melodrama, and few movies better depict the sad comfort and dead-end refuge of small tragedies. Buscemi, as he often does, leaves you laughing but feeling guilty about it. Tommy is only a couple of bleary-eyed mistakes away from Manchester by the Sea. Jonathan Stevenson (April 1, 2, 11:30am at the Nitehawk’s Chloë Sevigny retrospective)