Taller Than the Trees opens with what appears to be a quote from Henry David Thoreau from which the movie draws its title. I could launch into a whole tirade about that. I could complain that director Dean Tucker included the epigraph solely to make sure we know just how well read he is and what a great taste in books he has.
I could point out that since the quote contains the title, there’s no need whatsoever for the entire quote — if we’re well read ourselves, we might spot the reference unaided. As a reader and a viewer, I’d like to be given the benefit of the doubt; as a filmmaker, Tucker would have done well to assume intelligence, rather than ignorance, on the part of the audience.
If we know our Thoreau, we’re going to feel like you’re patronizing us; if we only know of Thoreau, we’re still going to think you’re shamelessly name-dropping him; and if we don’t know Thoreau from Adam, why bring him up at all? When the show’s over, we’ll have learned less than nothing about him anyway.
Simply put, whether H.D. Thoreau went to the woods and came out taller than the trees is immaterial to the business at hand. Familiarity with a work or works can certainly inform and enhance the way that you experience another, similar work (for example, John Carpernter’s In the Mouth of Madness vis-a-vis the writings of H.P. Lovecraft), but it should never dictate your enjoyment of it — and in this case, it doesn’t; Tucker could have quoted — or not quoted — Robert Frost and called the movie Lovely, Dark, and Deep instead, and it wouldn’t have made it any better or worse or, for that matter, different.
So yeah, I could have gone off on a rant. I could have wondered why Tucker didn’t incorporate the quotation into the dialogue, thereby making its inclusion less pretentious. I could have argued against justifying the decision to shoot in the woods; it’s economical and the location is the best part of the film, and that should be all that matters.
Finally, I could have stressed that, unless it’s a biographical documentary, we approach a movie eager to learn about what its author, and no one else, has to say — and what I learned about Tucker is what renders my would-be diatribe moot.
As it turns out, Tucker isn’t quite as well read as he would have liked us to believe. “I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees. – The original source for this quotation, often attributed to Thoreau, has not been identified.” Some people go as far as claiming that “Thoreau penned these words in his memoir Walden,” which is not the case at all (you can see for yourself).
It appears that Tucker’s erudition is of the secondhand variety. Unsurprisingly, his film is thoroughly un-Thoreau-like. As I hinted at above, the sylvan setting is awe-inspiring, but the protagonist doesn’t commune with it so much as mindlessly cuts through it — too preoccupied with his non sequitur-ridden, paranoiac stream of consciousness to be able to achieve Thoreau’s hallmark close observation of nature.
Farther still from Thoreau’s pastoral ideal, this graphorrheic fucker is both a smoker and a litterer — all things considered, maybe a better title would have been Taller Than the Burnt Stumps.
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