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The Deep End***

Margaret Hall (Tilda Swinton) is an affluent housewife married to an officer in the United States Navy on duty at sea, who lives with her children and father-in-law, Jack Hall (Peter Donat) in a beautiful house next to Lake Tahoe. When she discovers that her oldest son, Beau (Jonathan Tucker), is involved with Darby Reese (Josh Lucas), a sleazy thirty-year old guy who owns a fancy gay club called The Deep End in Reno, she goes to the club, confronts Darby, and demands that he stop seeing Beau. That night, however, when Darby comes to the house for a clandestine tryst, he and Beau quarrel and come to blows.

The next morning, Margaret finds the body of Darby with an anchor through his lungs next to the lake. Horrified by the possibility that her son might be arrested, she sinks the corpse in the lake rather than reporting the crime to the police. But no sooner does she think she's off the hook than a tough blackmailer, Alek Spera (Goran Visjnic), shows up. In the meantime, Darby's remains have been discovered, and not only does Alek know that Darby was going to visit Beau on the night the former vanished, but he also possesses a videotape of the boy being anally penetrated by the older man.

Through an interesting and unforeseen twist of events, however, Alek begins to take a more benevolent interest in the affairs of the Hall's after he comes to collect his money the following day and arrives at the moment the senior Hall has had a heart attack. When his behind the scenes accomplice, Carlie Nagel (Raymond Barry) becomes impatient with Margaret's delays in forking over the dough and wants to resort to more forceful methods, Alek becomes her defender, ultimately rescuing Margaret from her precarious situation, but paying for his altruism with his life. 

Directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, who also collaborated on the screenplay, The Deep End is quite an elegant production. Giles Nuttgens supplied the striking location cinematography of Lake Tahoe and its environs, with the production design by Kelly McGehee and Christopher Tandon. But the film's main strength is the justly praised performance by Tilda Swinton as Margaret, who is competently supported by her fellow performers, but especially Visjnic as the reluctant extortionist. In some shots, Swinton made me think of Deborah Kerr, and she brings to her role a subtly underplayed intensity like that which Kerr radiated as Karen Holmes in Fred Zinemann's adaptation of James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1953).

Although it take place in a contemporary, even a trendy setting, The Deep End is very much a 1940s picture in both its plot situation and dominant themes. (Based on The Blank Wall, a novel by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, the story was previously filmed in 1949 by Max Ophuls under the title The Reckless Moment, as several reviewers have noted.) The dramatic focus is on the struggle of a woman to save her family at any cost--shades of Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce--and the action unfolds in a classy bourgeois milieu with nary a person of color in sight. 

No small part of the film's attraction, I think, resides in the near shock of seeing this kind of material anachronistically transferred to present day America.  Lake Tahoe is hardly a backwater, but the characters in The Deep End seem to lead a totally insular, if not exactly blessed existence. No word of unemployment, environmental pollution, or election fraud seems ever to have ruffled these waters. Where Pearl Harbor only managed to make World War II look like an overblown costume ball, The Deep End painstakingly moves the skeletal remains of a certain variety of 1940s thriller to 2001--which is not to say that it succeeds in reviving them. 

The 1940s were the high water period of the psychological thriller, which began to fade out after the end of World War II. Within the genre itself, however, a conspicuous place was occupied by what might be dubbed the "skeleton-in-the-closet" subgenre, which dealt with crimes of violence that occurred within the framework of close--often, too close--family relationships. Probably the best known example of the subgenre today is Alfred Hitchcock's great Shadow of a Doubt (1943), but at least one director, Robert Siodmak, specialized in presenting sagas of wildly dysfunctional family life like The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), and The Suspect (1945). 

But The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry makes it clear why this situation does not easily lend itself to being updated. The family unit not only in this film, but in all the examples of the subgenre, is closed in on itself to a high degree, simultaneously fortress and hothouse--small wonder that it might provide the breeding ground for such strange growths as incest or pedophilia. At the same time, no proper citizen would have suspected his or her neighbors of harboring such monstrosities. The effect of the "skeleton-in-the-closet" thrillers resulted from playing off the audience's expectations that everyone was an average Joe against the revelation of what the "normal" American home could hide. What Charles Addams did for laughs with his notorious cartoon family, these motion pictures did for the sake of high drama. 

But where would anyone find this kind of family in 2001? Since the days of the bobbysoxers, the American home has been exposed to all the disruptive agents of social change through the media, and it would be silly to insist on the point. The typical contemporary home is no fortress but an open marketplace for every kind of huckster with something to peddle to the kids, whether it be toys or dope.  Yet to achieve any kind of dramatic credibility, The Deep End has to postulate a community that seems happily exempt from these pressures, and this piece of poetic license may in turn account for a significant lacuna in the film's narrative logic. 

If the movie develops the character of the mother fighting to defend her home in considerable detail, it leaves that of her son nearly blank. In effect, he has violated two taboos, but the film shows nothing of the turmoil that must going inside him. A love affair between a teenage male and an older woman would be highly emotionally charged--a fortiori, one between a boy of the same age and an adult man. But The Deep End never bothers to explain how Beau, who is portrayed not as a hip young dude but a rather straight-laced college bound type, ever came to get involved with the nefarious Darby in the first place.

Somehow Beau managed to find his way to that wild place in Reno which resembles an opium den concocted by MGM in the 1940s for a Vincente Minnelli Technicolor® musical, with its dim lighting, diaphanous drapery, and phosphorescent blue decor. But then Beau must be aware of gay culture, of gay publications such as newspapers and magazines, or possibly of gay sites on the Internet. But anything of that kind seems unthinkable in the antiseptic, puritanical environment in which he dwells. The film never even allows him to glance longingly at beefy types in a bodybuilding mag, much less to give any sign that he might be sexually drawn to other males. Did telepathy lead him to Darby?

What I found even more problematic was the film's unwillingness--or inability--to explain the attraction between Beau and Darby. There is only one scene in which they encounter each other in private, when Darby comes to visit Beau at his lakeside home late at night, presumably for clandestine sex. The scene leaves no doubt about the sexual nature of their friendship, but Darby treats his partner as affectionately as Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane) treats Elsa (Rita Hayworth) in Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai. The two meet in the boathouse, and come to blows after Darby cynically admits that he had tried to extort money from Beau's mother in return for staying away from her son.

Perhaps because I had seen the trailer for L.I.E. just before viewing The Deep End, Darby reeked of sexual predator to me. Yet this device seems to me a cheap recourse to melodrama, just as the character, like the evil Duke in Moulin Rouge, seems to me a shabby throwback to the villains of days of yore. (This must be the summer for the return of the melodramatic repressed.) I am happy that The Deep End does not want to pruriently dangle this situation in front of the audiences' eyes, but there is a difference between aesthetic restraint and shallow dramaturgy which the movie never comes to terms with.

I can imagine that a boy like Beau who is in the throes of trying to come to terms with his sexuality doesn't want to trick with his high school buddies. On the other hand, this is no twelve-year old whom the baseball coach has lured to his home after pitching practice with promises of ice cream. There must have been some chemistry at work to account for Beau's passionate involvement with Darby, but that chemistry remains wholly obscure in The Deep End. If a movie wants to venture into unfamiliar waters like these, it should have the courage to get wet and not just stick to safely wading around the edges of the lake.

The Deep End is quite a well-made movie, but I had an inescapable sense of déjà vu while watching it, as if the movie were following a series of predictable moves that I knew from older thrillers. Everything has a highly calculated quality to it, even the relatively few visual flourishes the film allows itself. For example, when the grandfather suffers his heart attack while carrying a large container of water, the film makes a brief use of slow motion as the water splashes over the floor--but only just for long enough to punctuate the incident. To be sure, in these days of CGI-powered productions, it is almost relief to see a movie which does not attempt to underline every dramatic climax as heavily as possible.

Nevertheless, The Deep End scores its points a little too smugly for comfort. In spite of the identification with the heroine and her plight that it succeeds in creating, the film never manages to evoke the nightmarish sense of helplessness of a great blackmail movie like Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window or Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. Yet it is not necessary to go so far back in time to find examples of films that handle the same kind of material far more effectively, nor do the examples need be such prestigious ones. The lacustrine locales as well as a common theme--that of an upper middle class family threatened by hostile outside forces--immediately brought to mind Robert Zemeckis'  What Lies Beneath (2000).

The Zemeckis movie is not without its problems. But as The Deep End unreeled, I could not help remembering how effective the first part of What Lies Beneath had been in creating an aura of suspenseful foreboding about the events taking place at the lake. The Deep End is a well-paced motion picture--the top-notch editing is the work of Lauren Zuckerman--yet it never matches such electrically charged moments as the one in which Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer) spies on the mysterious dwelling next door. Ironically, What Lies Beneath might have been a far better movie if the threat in that movie had turned out to be something as tangible as a blackmailer, instead of a phantom.

It is hardly surprising that The Deep End has gotten very favorable reviews from the critics. In advertising for the movie, David Denby is quoted as calling it "The best American movie of 2001". Since I haven't been able yet to run down Denby's review in The New Yorker, I would hesitate to pass judgment on it, but his statement seems to me highly precipitous, even assuming he means that The Deep End is the best movie of the year so far. But his reaction is typical of that of many older reviewers, who have hailed the film as if it marked the return of Astraea to earth.

The Deep End is arty rather than artistic, stylish rather than stylistic. The most interesting films of the year that I have seen so far--I would not even say the "best"--are Memento, Amores Perros, Moulin Rouge, and A.I. These are all films that take considerable risks, and the last two, at least, do not always succeed in making good on the risks they take. Also, all four films are characterized by a greater or lesser element of stylistic roughness, but that roughness is precisely what makes them stand out in comparison to most of this year's releases. 

The depressing fact that Michael Bay can spend money like tap water, and still not come up with a credible facsimile of an old time action movie in Pearl Harbor is no reason to praise a movie like The Deep End to the skies for just doing its job well. I can only be happy that an independent production like this has done so well at the box office, but I hope it doesn't forecast a trend. I'm not looking forward to a  soulfully intelligent remake of Leave Her to Heaven

Production data courtesy of The Internet Movie Database

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