If a gang of young thugs were chasing you through the desolate sections of the city park, desperate to beat your living daylights out, what would you do? For Treed Murray’s lead character, the safest refuge is up a giant American beech tree.
Unfortunately, though, Murray’s (David Hewlett) choice to climb the tree creates a series of problems for him.
Although he can kick the gang members to the ground as they try to climb up, his situation devolves into one of waiting.
The gang goes through his briefcase and calls his wife on his cell phone. Lead gang member Shark (Cle Bennett) insists they will wait for him to come down, while Murray insists he wait until a passerby discovers his illegal confinement to a tree.
Canadian producer Helen du Troit’s previous work as programmer, coordinator and publicist at varying international film festivals around the globe has given him the critical experience to invest in the Treed Murray script by director William Phillips. Treed Murray is Phillips’ first full-length feature film. He graduated from U of T in 1986 with a Science degree before moving on to Ryerson’s Film Studies program.
Shot in Toronto’s own Boyd Conservation Area northwest of the city, the film is not only a battle between rich and poor, but also a setting for a deeper probe into the preconceptions we carry about people that belong to certain groups, be they based on class or style. As the waiting game drags on, Murray and the gang learn much more about one another than they ever intended.
But the film is hardly sappy drama, and is more easily classified as an action thriller. Perhaps its most unique aspect is its unusual and single setting, the tree. In the words of du Troit, Phillips’ success in keeping “the audience’s interest in a feature set in one location (is) staggering.”
The single setting is kept alive with various forms of conflict, dialogue, and changing lighting as the movie progresses from day to night and then to morning. The idea of the tree as the centrepiece of the script also made the feature doable within a low budget.
The acting is fairly convincing and mature, and doesn’t appear to have been affected by the low budget. Hewlett’s performance is excellent, providing a solid foundation for the cast.
Some may know Hewlett from his role as Grant Jansky on Traders. Cle Bennett, spawning from Ajax, is most recently known for his role in the Showtime series Hoop Life. The gang members, however, weren’t very tough and were drastically stereotypical. “The Ravens,” the “real” gang of the park, are portrayed over-dramatically with bloodied knives in the miniscule amount of time they are in the film. As far as I know, “real” gangs don’t operate in the Warrior-esque mode anymore, if they ever did.
Although the film is certainly worth the admission price, never boring and original, it does carry just a hint of that Canadian low-budget quality that we are undeniably familiar with.
