A very good debut by writer/director Steve Buscemi, "Trees Lounge" stars Buscemi himself as a bug-eyed alcoholic who mourns the loss of his lover and child. Would his life have been better had he made less mistakes? With whom does blame lie? Can he change? Comprised of a series of sensitively sketched vignettes, "Trees Lounge" mostly finds Buscemi perched atop barstools, nursing booze, sucking on cigarettes or snorting cocaine; anything to escape a life he despises. Elsewhere he strikes up a relationship with a young woman, played by the ethereal Chloe Sevigny. Buscemi's aims may be modest, but his film does well to capture a tone of melancholia and regret. "Trees Lounge" unfolds like a Tom Waits record, or perhaps the boozy laments of a Raymond Carver or Charles Bukowski.7.9/10 – Worth one viewing. See "Ghost World" and Dan Rush's "Everything Must Go".

Some guy loses his girlfriend, his job and now drinks all day in a boring bar. He then inherits an ice cream van from his deceased uncle and drives around the streets half-bored selling sweets.This is a perfect example that illustrates good actors don't necessarily make good films! The characters are weak, the story told a thousand times before and the complete luck of active plot makes the film suitable only for TV on a Sunday afternoon. Buscemi fails to push the actors to their limits resulting in a 'soap opera' style performance which is well below the average. Most of the scenes were pointless and contributed nothing to the film.Trees Lounge could have started straight after Tommy inherited the Van (thirty minutes before the end) and still wouldn't make any difference! If you do end up watching the film just imagine how the film would be like if Tarantino directed it.Better watch TV commercials :(

From the quirkiest of the quirky, Steve Buscemi premieres his first film with a nuclear blast. The cast, which most have gone on to really big films, all artfully create the character study which is what Tree's Lounge really happens to be. Each cast member should be awarded an Oscar for how real they portray this sad set of characters. Like a step into the daily wrongness of a typical craphole which can be anywhere in the USA, Buscemi's breakout performance as the alcoholic ice cream man captures a rawness of how a man can be degraded so swiftly in the morays and questionable social structures that permeate our culture. Brilliantly written, Buscemi makes the assumption of just how relationships are all based in fear and the fact of this fear is why the characters act out and react as they do throughout this film but as we all do in the real world as well. When looking for a slice of life that reminds us just how not to be, Tree's Lounge is the perfect example. This film is a triumph.

Let's be blunt: Steve Buscemi is one of the greatest actors of all time. And I say "actor," not "star," because he has re-defined the true art of divulging into character and literally performing so well we come to believe he is an entirely different person. He also has some of the best lines of all time. ("You're acting like a first-year thief; I'm acting like a professional"; "Whoa, Daddy!"; "You should see the other guy!")In "Trees Lounge," his directorial debut, Buscemi (pronounced "Bu-schemy") plays Tommy, a struggling alcoholic living in a pleasant middle-America town. Tommy thrives on the Trees Lounge, a local bar, where he mopes about all day long in self-loathing, hitting on the bartender (Carol Kane) and getting into brawls. His life is an utter waste until he lands a job as an ice cream man and thereby sparks a daring relationship with a 17-year-old girl (Chloe Sevigny). I'd be lying to you if I were to claim that "Trees Lounge" had a bare minimum of character metamorphosis. Tommy doesn't evolve very much throughout the film - in the beginning and until the very end he remains a miserable soul, unable to decide whether he's unhappy because he's drunk or drunk because he's unhappy. It brings to mind the speech by John Cusack in "High Fidelity," or even Mike Myers as Fat Ba$tard in "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me": Are they unhappy because of their passion, or vice versa?"Trees Lounge" is obviously a low budget effort by Buscemi, apparently powered by his own passion towards the project. A lesser actor and director might have turned "Trees Lounge" into an unfunny bar-based comedy in the vein of "Cheers," minus the likable characters and witty one-liners, and presented us with a one-dimensional character who displays all the characteristics of a hero and yet is found sitting in a bar all day long. Almost magically, Buscemi avoids these clichés and reveals a wonderfully wise and observant character study of one man - and although he isn't always the most likable of people, he always manages to remain realistically crafted, and realistically kind - he does things we disapprove of, such as drinking, drugs, etc. Yet we never feel any content towards Tommy. Perhaps because he connects with a vital human element within all of us.Indeed, Buscemi portrays Tommy as a very flawed character, and yet a strangely addictive one. I'm glad the focus of the story wasn't on someone else - out of all of the characters in the film, I liked Tommy the most, perhaps because he is given more depth and focus than the others. But yet I also firmly believe it has something to do with Buscemi's great acting abilities. As a character actor he is superb, and one of the funniest men in Hollywood - despite being what could be considered as a "serious actor." When he makes a movie as good as "Trees Lounge," it makes you wonder why he feels the need to pop up in all of Adam Sandler's tired vehicles. He's even the highlight in those films.The film has its fair share of cameos, most noticeably by Samuel L. Jackson in a role similar to that he played in "Hard Eight." But where the film truly succeeds is not via the surface, but through a much deeper level of realism. We meet people like Tommy a lot. Whether it is drunkards or loafers, they're everywhere. "Trees Lounge" is disturbingly depressing on a very subtle level because of the way it deals with Tommy. It's hard to truly explain the feelings the film creates without ruining the ending, which I will resist doing. But it's unexpected and somehow very depressing on an unusual level. No stereotypical deaths or such bold turns in the screenplay. It's the subtle stuff that drives "Trees Lounge." It has its flaws but it also surpasses movies of its kind on a level that not many manage to do.