A film can be prestigious as balls and still draw boos from audiences – something Naomi Watts and Matthew McConaughey have unfortunately just discovered for themselves at the Cannes Film Festival
The pair’s new movie, the Gus Van Sant-directed drama The Sea Of Trees, debuted on Saturday in contention for the Palme d’Or prize, but reportedly, it drew the first big negative response of the season thus far.
The film drew “unintended laughs and derisive whistles” from the audience of ostensible grown-ups, and was later criticised as being “long-winded”, “sticky and gooey” and “culturally patronising.”
The film co-stars Japanese screen legend Ken Watanabe, and per its plot description on IMDB: A suicidal American befriends a Japanese man lost in a forest near Mt. Fuji and the two search for a way out.
Watts and McConaughey both did their best to laugh off the negative response at subsequent press events. “Anyone has as much right to boo as they do to ovate,” he told media.
“I love logic, I love science. I believe that we are damn well expected to have our hands on the wheel, we are the architects of our own life,” he added, in classic profound-yet-barely-comprehensible McConaughey style.
Watts, who copped a similar drubbing several years back for her part in the biopic Diana, also defended Gus Van Sant’s film, calling the script “a beautiful love story that was painful and tragic.”
via Fairfax
Photo: Pascal le Secretain via Getty Images
Photo: Pascal le Secretain via Getty Images
