Trügerische Stille

THE DEEP END / (2001) *** (out of four)

By Blake French:

Lake Tahoe, the tenth deepest lake in the world, is a long, cold body of clear, turquoise water thriving at 6,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. Isolated by snow-covered mountain tops, ponderosa pines, and upper class wood homes, this is the perfect backdrop for The Deep End.

The Deep End captures some of this harrowing atmosphere, but I wanted even more. The photography, by Giles Nuttgens, won the coveted Best Cinematography Award at the Sundance Film Festival this year for its unflinching look at images of Lake Tahoe awash in moral tensions. The camera cuts through aquariums, dripping water faucets, bursting water bottles, and of course, across and beneath the lake's surface. On a photographic level, this is one great movie.

Writers/directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel found their inspiration for The Deep End from the little known 1940's novel The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. The Ladies Home Journal first published an abridged version of the story. It became so popular that the writer eventually made it into a novel. According to the film's press notes, even Alfred Hitchcook was impressed as evident when he chose the book for his classic anthology My Favorites in Suspense-1959. Holding's novel was the only full length feature book of fiction included on that list.

McGehee and Siegel previously worked on the independent film Suture. "In their day, stories like these were very subversive because they asked questions about the nature of families, about the limits of communication, and the loneliness of personal sacrifice," says Siegel of Holding's story. "We wanted to bring those same elements in a contemporary setting with characters that would be sympathetic and believable to people today."

Holding certainly did have an innate understanding that true suspense emerges not just from violence and mystery, but also from the fabric of everyday life. The Deep End examines a housewife named Margaret (Tilda Swinton) who protects her gay teenage son (Jonathan Tucker) by covering up the death of his lover (Josh Lucas). Did her son kill this person? Someone might know the truth behind this act of violence, but silence has a very high price tag.

A very involving introduction and first act suffer after the diabolical murder plot takes a downhill spiral into a different set of events. Alek Spera (Gordan Visnijc), who needs money for his boss (Raymond J. Berry), creates a blackmail scheme. The film goes downhill from here, but the overall product is far from boring.

That's largely because of the beautiful performances. Tilda Swinton, seen opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in 1999's The Beach, leads the cast with a powerhouse performance. Swinton paints a vivid, intriguing portrait of domestic serenity, peaceful ordinariness, and motherhood's merciful nature. She can move the audience with utter silence; her eyes exclude intelligence, instinct, and compassion. She completes what the movie leaves unfinished, including her character's adherence to routine and complete loss of moral compass.

Gordon Visnjic (Dr. Luka Kovac on "ER.") with his dark, brooding physique, creates a shadowy nature for his character. His motives remain a mystery; we never know why he does what he does. It lets the audience guess-but we do not have much to guess with. The film does not complete his character. He's one of the most interesting characters here, but Visnjic needs more to chew on.

The filmmakers comment about the hidden romantic feelings between Margaret and Alek. "It's the kind of romance I miss in movies. It's not explicit and it is not necessarily even realized, but it is there in a haunting, melancholic way," says Visnjic. Where? We never really grasp these potentially fascinating plot points because the movie never examines these emotions. This is the kind of material that would have taken The Deep End to another level of interest.

I cannot believe the negative remarks about this movie. I thought this movie was excellent. The majority of complaints on this board, are more about the lighting, sound and technical crap that regular people who go to the movies just don't look for. You go to a movie to get lost for a couple of hours and enjoy yourself. If your going to the movies only for the technical side of the movie, then why go at all.

This movie showed the extent that a mother would go through to protect her son and her family. This lady totally went above and beyond everything to protect her son from the truth, which he never found out.

The only real problem I had with this movie was that the word "Gay" was never said. Not once. Unless my hearing left me when it was said. It was referenced and even a little sex was shown, but the word was never said.

Other than that, I enjoyed this movie completely. Just Terrific!!!!!!!!

This film is like a great term paper: it flows like fire-water from a heated pitcher. I bought it on a caprice, only to rivet myself to the screen unexpectedly. Tilda Swinton is absolutely flawless (not to mention Visnjic) in a very strange tale about a mother's endless desire to protect. Not that I consider it a true flaw, but I would have liked for Margaret to tell Beau exactly why things had been so screwy and deadly for the past two days. The opportunity arises at the very end but she decides not. For me, I certainly would have explained to a seventeen-year-old boy that if he screws around with derelicts in seedy closets, people die. It's sort of an important part of growing up. However, directors McGehee and Siegel decide to omit that part. While the film is a must for thrill-seekers, I really felt that the boy should have been let in on the sticky, lethal web his juvenile lust did spin. BUT TILDA ROCKS! Just like this movie.

It appears that either this movie works for you or doesn't. It worked for me for several reasons, not the least being the great performance by Tilda Swinton as Margaret, an upper-middle-class mother with an obsessive desire to protect her son. Swinton projects the image of a woman who can handle any situation; blackmail, the revelation of her son's sexual orientation, the notion that her son may be a murderer, taking care of her aging father-in-law, and running the family are all in a day's work. I was drawn into the story by the beautiful photography, the captivating music, and the plot twists. For whatever reason I did not dwell on plot holes but simply allowed myself to be absorbed. And, if you accept Margaret's almost pathologically obsessive devotion to her family, then most of what happens hangs together.

I found the unexpected relationship that develops between Margaret and the blackmailer to be interesting. The experience is more transformative for him than for her. I also like the way the tables were turned on the relationship between Margaret and her spoiled son. In the beginning his behavior was confusing to Margaret and he was not willing to talk about it and in the end Margaret's behavior was mysterious to her son and she was not willing to talk about it.

It was only the contrived ending that bothered me.

Taking care of others often involves self-sacrifice, and mothers of most feather will put themselves in harm's way to shield their young. In the THE DEEP END, a modern retelling of Max Ophuls' 1946 thriller THE RECKLESS MOMENT, Margaret Hall is a mother of three willing to do whatever it takes to keep her family safe from the irrational forces that follow her teenage son home one night from a nightclub of ill repute. But mom, played with stoic intensity by Tilda Swinton, quickly learns that heroism doesn't fit on a calendar already packed with soccer practices, trumpet lessons and visits to the grocery store.

Superficially the story concerns a vicious run of bad luck. Noirish events are set in motion when Margaret tries to cover up the accidental death of her son's unsavory friend (Josh Lucas as a spookily playful predator). The next day a man with a dice tattoo on his neck knocks on her door and demands $50,000 to suppress a videotape linking her son to the death, which police have ruled a homicide. The dramatic heart of the film concerns Margaret's dealings with the blackmailer, cagily played by Goran Visnjic, ER's Slavic heartthrob in a less soapy but perversely related role. Mr. Visnjic is credible though never quite menacing as a predator in awe of, and ultimately vulnerable to, his tender prey.

Taken at this level THE DEEP END, luminously shot in the gambling resort of Lake Tahoe, is an eerie joy ride that leans heavily on coincidence to tangle then unknot its plot. But the presence of Tilda Swinton indicates that more is going on here than melodrama. Ms. Swinton is a brilliant post-feminist actress whose work sheds light on paradoxes of femininity and female power. Her earlier films include ORLANDO, in which she explored androgyny and immortality, and FEMALE PERVERSIONS, a Freudian critique of the feminist myth of "having it all." In THE DEEP END, Ms. Swinton's nuanced performance comments on motherhood as a source of both power and vulnerability. A woman may be willing to do anything for her son, as Margaret Hall clearly is, yet still be constrained by a "glass ceiling" of caregiving attachments that prevent her from achieving man-style success. In cinema, the latter typically means blowing the villains' brains out, something Margaret Hall might consider doing if she weren't so busy taking care of her kids and aging father-in-law.

Throughout the film Margaret tries but is unable to reach her husband, a Navy officer on an aircraft carrier somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. His unavailability is more than an inconvenience. Attempting to negotiate with the blackmailers, Margaret finds herself hamstrung when the bank refuses a critical withdrawal without her husband's say-so. Mr. Hall's conspicuous absence and his infirm father's burdensome presence amplify Margaret's predicament, showing how hollow the conventions of marriage and machismo can be. The fact that both men are soldiers, society's designated heroes, is no accident. They defend motherhood in the abstract while remaining blind to a real mother's needs.

Margaret Hall is Ms. Swinton's most reluctant feminist character to date, a woman whose maternal ferocity the family setting renders moot and who must ultimately rely on the kindness of strangers. Her performance transforms THE DEEP END from a good summer thriller to a dramatic critique of the politics of caregiving.