Traición en lo profundo

I honestly fell for the trap that this movie sets up throughout the plot and the surprise ending. The problem I had with this surprise ending compared to other surprise endings is that when you see a surprise ending, it's supposed to make you think, "Well, that makes sense." This one does the exact opposite and the movie does a poor job in my opinion of setting up the surprise ending. This is unfortunate considering the acting was superior in every area. I couldn't help but think of "Fight Club" as they are running down the surprise ending. Parallel to what we were shown in the movie is a view of what "actually" happened. And as good as I think Lucas Black is as an actor, he doesn't even compare to Brad Pitt or Edward Norton at least not at this point in his career. Overall, a strange and diluted plot that does not fill two hours until you see what happens at the end at which point I was left a little wanting.

A Southern boy (Lucas Black) gets a job working at a motel near an Indian reservation and casino. He discovers that the motel owner (Peter Coyote), a 1/8 Indian, is involved in a corrupt scheme with his Indian friends to get control of the casino. Some people are killed and the Southern boy believes the motel owner is responsible. The Southern boy has a fling with a waitress (Lesley Ann Warren), but becomes obsessed with the motel owner's wife (Mia Maestro). The boy hatches a plan to steal the husband's cash and run away with the wife. Before he does, he must engage in a challenge boxing match with the motel owner, an aging former pro boxer. The cast of characters in this movie are very interesting and the acting is really good. The atmosphere is eerie. This movie held my interest completely and I am easily bored. This movie deserves better than the 5.0 rating at this writing. I grade it an 8.

I wonder if the reviewer I'm thinking of even watched the film. Like, for instance, not realizing that Nat got the car keys from the guy who was beating the crap out of him in the bar. And set in Louisiana? Sheep farm? Sheesh.

OK, it was a bit disjointed in places, but not so much that anybody paying attention couldn't follow the action. The main thing, for this type of movie, is to keep you guessing. This it did, right up to the end. Peter Coyote was brilliant, and Lucas Black got it pretty spot on as well. All the supporting cast were top notch.

The trouble with any film that relies on a surprise ending is that it rarely invites repeat viewings. Alas, such is the case here. Otherwise, I would've given it one or two more stars. But it gave me a good ride, and that's all I expected. I'll be looking for more from this director.

I will confess that the choices that director Marfield has made concerning cast and crew make me somewhat more sympathetic towards "Deepwater" than I otherwise might have been. Lucas Black is an underrated actor who deserves bigger roles and Charlie Clouser's NiN-like music suits the mood of the film very well. But I think the film has merits of its own. Compared to fellow indie/festival flick "Down in the Valley", which has some interesting similarities, "Deepwater" feels much more genuine to me.

A young man just out of ... well, some sort institution winds up in a small town working for a strange fellow (Peter Coyote) and lusting for his wife (Maestro). What initially seems like U- turn revisited turns out to be a quite different film in the end. The acting (mainly from washed-out but cool actors apart from Black) and the mood keep you fairly interested and the fairly down-to-earth tone that the film finally adopts work fine if you ask me. Worth watching, although not a masterpiece by any standard.

Lucas Black is a naive young man who is more or less forced by circumstances to repair and repaint a dilapidated rural motel owned by Peter Coyote. I doubt you've ever seen Coyote in a role like this -- totally weird, his voice lowered to a metallic rasp, his get-up -- the voice, the cigar, the hat, the white windbreaker with the rolled-back sleeves -- ripped off from Robert Mitchum's psychopathic heavy in the original "Cape Fear."

Here's what I mean by "weird." Black and Coyote near the beginning are sitting in a café over breakfast, discussing the arrangement. Coyote conspicuously picks up the salt and the pepper shakers and gives each a quick wipe with his handkerchief. Black later tires to shake some salt on his meal, the top falls from the shaker, the meal is ruined. He makes an elliptical allusion to there being "still room for another body in that lake." Coyote laughs in the most unbuttoned way. "You and I are gonna get along fine!" They are?

It reminded me of a ride I caught while hitch-hiking one night outside Las Vegas. The car was warm and comfortable, the family utterly bourgeois, a man, his wife, and a baby asleep in the back seat, until the driver turned to his wife and asked in dead earnest, "Where should we ditch this hot car, Honey?" It called for an immediate redefinition of the situation. Coyote makes frequent remarks that are as unnerving as that.

There is quite a focus on cars, on what they look like, on the year and the make, and on how fast they go. The whole film carried with it a kind of rural Southern sensibility. The accent is Southern and so is the landscape. So is the dialog: "While you were out there pumpin' that car, your man here was carvin' on me like a big tom turkey." Mia Maestro as Iris, the maid who upkeeps the motel, is not Southern. She transcends regionality. Anything that so closely approaches a Platonic ideal can't carry with it any regional attributes. The role of course is beneath her but then everything is beneath her, a gilded Athena in a mossy Parthenon. Her voice is silky and sensual with Argentine overtones. Bezos a vos! You must see her in Carlos Saura's "Tango."

The director has done his best and it's not bad. Some of the shots are conspicuously arty. He's avoided the modern tendency to wobble the camera and focus on irrelevant artifacts during a conversation. And when Lucas Black and Mia Maestro make love, he's also avoided the cliché of the strange hand and fingers caressing an unidentified but sinuous body part. However, there's only so much you can do to signal copulation without actually showing it, so we get two hands gripping a partner's hair. The scene proves that Black himself is no saint, since Maestro is Coyote's dissatisfied wife. Only towards the climax, when Black is training for a boxing match with Coyote -- the prize being Maestro -- is the stage of ejaculatory inevitability reached and we're handed a tasteless explosion of editorial razzle-dazzle.

I suspect that the author of the novel, Matthew F. Jones, knows his way around manual labor because the film doesn't shy away from showing us Lucas Black scraping paint off the weathered boards of the motel. That willingness to show people at work is one of the things I admired about James Jones' novel, "From Here to Eternity." Val Lewton was careful to show us his principals at work too. And I admired the way that a truly sinister element creeps so gradually into the movie. We know Peter Coyote is weird, but it's only incrementally that we find out HOW weird. I'll end with the observation that one of the characters is a truly sick puppy but probably not the one you imagine.