‘We are the entanglements’: exploring our relationship with trees

One might reasonably ask if the Emmy award–winning documentarian Irene Taylor’s new movie – an expansive investigation into how people and trees coexist – is most fundamentally a movie about people via trees, or about trees via people? For Taylor, the answer is typically unconventional – it’s actually neither; it’s a film that, as its title suggests, is about entanglements. “We are the entanglements,” she said during an interview about her film. “Characters in the film are drawn to a family tree, a garden full of trees, a forest. But the entanglements are the relationships that we have around those trees. These characters show us how trees can really drive us apart, and also bring us together.”

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Trees and Other Entanglements tells the fascinating, occasionally intersecting stories of various individuals’ often strange and surprising relationships with trees. Mostly based in the Pacific north-west of the United States and Canada, the film’s central characters include George Weyerhaeuser, who transformed the family timber empire with a model of harvesting trees that has caused severe environmental damage; Ryan Neil, one of the few Americans to master the Japanese art of bonsai; Beth Moon, a photographer who has gained worldwide acclaim for her masterly large-format prints of trees; and Dirk Brinkman, a force for reforestation for over 50 years.

“I was really looking at an ecosystem of narratives,” she said. “If you give one more screen time, it would have changed the narrative, you have to balance everything. It was editorially a huge exercise in film-making. I’ll never be the same film-maker again.”

Taylor follows the stories of these individuals and others in a highly idiosyncratic way, making them as much about her own obsessions as a film-maker as it is about their lives. “This was the most liberating film I ever made,” she said. “I was able to go in so many different directions.”

Taylor was inspired to begin work on a film about trees after reading author Richard Powers’s 2019 Pulitzer winner The Overstory, which brought out the resonances between people and their trees. “It’s a book about characters whose lives were very interconnected with trees and each other. It provided a fascinating concept for how to talk about people, vis-a-vis trees.”

One of the most complicated people in the film is surely Weyerhaeuser. Known both as a timber baron and a conservationist, Weyerhaeuser’s fortune underwrites the majestic Pacific Bonsai Museum and funds tree farms and other environmental initiatives, while his company is also the largest private landowner in the US and one of the world’s largest fellers of trees. “I tried to be agnostic about what [Weyerhaeuser] was doing to trees,” Taylor told me. ‘When I met him, I didn’t know it would be three months before he died. I saw a person.”

One of the strangest episodes in Weyerhaeuser’s life – which Taylor is clearly fascinated by – was when the future empire-builder was kidnapped aged nine and kept in a ditch for eight days before his captors received $200,000 in ransom (approximately $4.5m today). Taylor relies on animation to put viewers into the viewpoint of young George, trying to imagine what it might have been like to go through such an ordeal. “I wondered whether his week in a ditch was the single most important moment, as a boy in a forest, looking up at trees,” said Taylor. “I was fascinated by what influenced him more than that fear he must have felt as a child surrounded by tall trees. He really presided over the most destructive era in logging in North America. I had very morally complex feelings about him, as with many of the issues in the film.”

As this indicates, one of the successes of Trees and Other Entanglements is its willingness to follow its subjects wherever they may go, regardless of how morally tricky their stories are. For instance, the bonsai artist Neil comes off as a strange and somewhat obsessed person – his attention to detail and work ethic are absolutely incredible, yet there is something unseemly about the way he talks about his trees, as well as the emotions that sit heavy over his life but that are rarely expressed. It is Taylor’s capacity to see trees as not just signs of virtue and connection to nature, but also to see them potentially as sources of dysfunction, or metaphors for disease and moral complications, that give her film a depth that takes it far beyond typically preachy environmentalist tracts. “In all cases I tried to put myself inside my characters’ mindset,” she said, “and home in on the emotional flashpoints of their stories.”

This complexity extends to Taylor herself, who appears in the film with her daughter, ripping enormous pieces of ivy off a tree on her property. “I’m never quite a passive observer, and I think the fact that I put myself in the film, which I think was a pretty radical choice – well, I was displaying my vulnerabilities.”

For Taylor, the act of ripping the ivy away from the tree that is strangled by it brings to mind her father’s battle with dementia, which she first explored in her 2019 film, Moonlight Sonata, her second film to deal with her father after 2007’s Hear and Now. “This is sort of the third in a trilogy of films that in part look at his life,” said told me. “I knew that this visceral feeling I had about the ivy suffocating this tree, that was analogous to the plaques suffocating my dad’s brain. It was so evident to me, but everyone thought I was a little crazy.”

Possibly the character that hews most close to Taylor herself is the photographer Beth Moon, who we first see hunting through the expansive wilds of the Mojave desert for one special Joshua tree. “I think Beth’s story and my story had the most corollary between them,” she said. One of the film’s most touching moments comes when Moon discovers that a majestic tree that she had photographed years ago had been destroyed by the forces of climate change. Her sense of grief and loss is more than palpable. “It’s very subtle, but at the end of the film, she’s not photographing trees any more – now she’s photographing seeds – because it’s just too sorrowful for her.”

It is tantalizing to think of the film that Trees and Other Entanglements might have been, as Taylor originally had plans to film worldwide, including Italian olive trees, which according to Taylor are the world’s oldest cultivated forests, a battle over the tree in Van Gogh’s final painting, and logging in the Brazilian rainforest. These big plans were ultimately scuttled by Covid restrictions, leaving Taylor to make a very different film, yet one that clearly made a virtue of its limitations. “I can recognize how the pandemic offered narrative restrictions that may have made the story more resonant,” she said.

Yet, for Taylor the allure of trees still beckons. “If I had to choose a subject for the rest of my life trees could be it,” she told me.

• Trees and Other Entanglements is now available on Max in the US and in the UK at a later date