Director: L.Z. Matthias
Writer: L.Z. Matthias
Cast: Owen Correll, Leah Wilczewski, Veronika Vozniak, Coretta Jewell, Charlotte Frances Akong
Running time: 14mins
The Legend of the Neverending Oak on the Corner of Sixth & Ave B isn’t exactly a pithy title. It would take up half the elevator pitch, just telling the weary producer what the project was called. Usually I’d let that slide – I don’t think it really impacts how effective a film is if its title doesn’t roll off the tongue. But here I think it speaks to a wider issue that runs through the production.
This is a film aimed at young children, aiming to encourage them to engage with nature; yet so much of it seems to neglect that target audience. How much chance do you think your project has for word-of-mouth hype among six-year-olds, when its name has at least 19 syllables (21 if you don’t vocally abbreviate ‘Avenue’)? How long will it take before they simply zone out when the Madonna/Kate Bush banter ensues? How likely do you find it that they will squint and strain their eyes to appreciate the grainy film and filters, which obscure key details during the story’s fantasy segment?
That is not to say this student production gets nothing right. We have a valuable lesson at the heart of the film, and some decent ideas when it comes to turning them into a fourth-wall-breaking narrative that blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. But there are many more lessons here for L.Z. Matthias and their team need to learn from this, for more impactful future projects.
The wrap-around story finds elementary teacher Mrs Powers (Veronika Vozniak, who the peculiar framing of most shots seems to be in a different dimension – rarely sharing even a corner of the screen with anyone) gathering up her class for an important lesson about the natural world. In the middle of New York, the children are sitting in a green oasis – a garden bursting with life amid the towering grey metropolis. To illustrate recent progress made in making the city more liveable, and ecologically diverse, while emphasising that this journey must continue, Mrs Powers tells her young audience the story of the Boy and the Green Woman.
To show we are moving to a story within a story, the photography shifts from clear, digital imagery, to 16mm film. We find ourselves in another time – the 1980s – where a young man (Owen Correll – whose performance comes across like Napoleon Dynamite starring a Bruce Springsteen biopic) finds himself wishing for more from life. In the barren streets of New York, deprived of greenery, the Boy regularly loses track of his work at the record store (this is where he attempts to encourage a frustrated customer to forsake Madonna for the artistry of Kate Bush) – with music his only escape. Music is also what draws his world to collide with that of the Green Woman (Leah Wilczewski, who comes across as baffled by so the modern world, despite regularly observing it through a tree-portal in New York City). The pair have their first meet-cute when he finds her sitting in the tree outside his apartment, strumming his guitar.
She promptly drops the guitar, smashing it, before disappearing farther up the tree. Slinging his shattered (or depending on certain continuity errors, totally intact) instrument over his shoulder, the Boy pursues – but rather than sitting on a tree-top in his neighbourhood, he finds himself clambering into a parallel universe, shrouded in an endless forest. It is here that, as he falls in love with the Green Woman (who somehow has an unshakeable tolerance for endless stories about New York’s independent music scene, and the perils of applying hair-gel before a gig), he also learns to appreciate the crucial need to reintroduce plants and greenery to his previously lifeless, miserable home.
Looking to add to the magical feel of this other world, a decision was made in production to apply an extra filter to the 16mm here. Whether we needed an extra reminder that this is now a world, within a world, within a story, is questionable – and certainly there must be better ways to do it than blurring proceedings to migraine-inducing levels.
The blur mercifully fades when things go awry for the Boy – accidentally breaking part of a tree leads him to be immediately banished from the Green Woman’s world, due to her assumption that humans are only interested in harvesting wood for their own greed. It seems a bit knee-jerk, considering the Boy is clearly trying not to live that way. But even so, it is hard to feel bad about the end of this relationship, considering we get to return to a world where our cataracts have dissolved.
Mrs Powers leaves the story’s ending up to our imagination, with the Boy spending his life planting trees to try and reconnect with the Green Woman. Ignoring the demands of the children to confirm if they ever did meet again, she shifts the lesson to its practical segment. To help us reconnect the two worlds, and make sure the two lovers are reunited, we can all play a role by planting and caring for trees in our cities – making our own lives that bit more liveable in the process, and reconnecting with that bit childish sense of wonder that nature can rekindle.
One nice touch added to this, is the bracelet which the camera eventually gives us a close-up of, dangling around Mrs Powers’ left wrist. It gives us either a pleasant real-world explanation, or a satisfactory continuation of the fantasy, depending on how grown-up/cynical you are feeling at this moment. It could either be emblematic of her authorship – she has constructed this story by drawing on elements of her own life, to inspire her class – or it could literally be a sign that it was all true, and she has held certain details back; she is linked to the fantasy world, she could even be the child who was born after a happy reunion between the Boy and the Green Woman.
The issue is, it’s hard to make out this connection if you don’t have the opportunity to pause or rewind the action. Mrs Powers’ amulet emulates the shape of ivy – and an ethereal white ivy was also wrapped around the Green Woman’s left arm. But the framing of the ivy in those fantasy scenes means we haven’t necessarily picked up on that.
In the 1980s New York sequence, we first see the Green Woman’s arms intertwined with green ivy; but she is sitting in a tree which is also covered in verdant foliage, so in that moment, we’re more likely to assume the ivy is part of the tree, rather than the character’s attire. Meanwhile, in the 1980s fantasy sequence, where the ivy is white, the Green Woman’s left arm is either out of shot, or obscured by the Vaseline that has seemingly been applied to the camera-lens (as with Somewhere in a Dream, apparently not being able to see properly is a key part of the ‘fantasy feel’ in any such film).
Again, it feels as though much of this film has been put together through an adult lens of what is desirable to communicate to kids, rather than what will help them to connect with the story. It is important to tell children about the environment – yes – and I think the core idea of The Legend of the Neverending Oak on the Corner of Sixth & Ave B was worthwhile. But to appeal to them, there needs to be more than a boy-meets-girl equation, or some vague hint at fantasy and magic. And there needs to be a good deal less discussion of 1980s garage bands or Wuthering Heights.
Even if much of this falls flat, I think writer-director L.Z. Matthias had their heart in the right place with this production. Considering the horrors of climate change, which are currently causing raging wild fires and suffocating heat waves around the world, the fact is that planting trees in cities has a measurable impact on temperatures. But maybe grounding more of these kinds of story in that reality would be more effective, than the (slightly patronising) approach of trying to simply motivate young people with simplistic allusions to aesthetic beauty. That might sound too brutal, but kids are living through this too, after all – and know when they are being coddled.
