Traición en lo profundo

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.

Where was I when this movie came out? I don't' remember it EVER coming out. But I was at the DVD rental store and saw this movie, and since all I wanted was to lie down and vegetate, I rented it because the cast was interesting and I thought I'd give it a try. It seemed like a big mistake at first. The first 45 minutes had me reaching for a magazine to read at the same time, because I was sure I knew what was going on, and some of the characters seemed, well, stupid. And I hate stupid characters... but after seeing it in it's entirely, it has really stuck with me.

Rent it, hang in there, and you'll be in for a treat.

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.

Deepwater 2005 suffers from a lack of plot. The scenes are not well connected. I think the main flaws are in the storyline and the director does not know where he is going with this film. It is pretty amateurish despite good efforts from main actors.

This was the only Seattle Film Festival film I went to, and I was pleased to find it better than many mainstream movies I've seen. It was an unnerving mystery that sucked me in and genuinely surprised me.

Peter Coyote's portrayal of a strange motel owner was my favorite part of the film. I've seen Coyote in a lot of movies, and this has got to be the most interesting role I've seen him play yet. You're never sure if you want to love him or fear him, and that ends up working perfectly for the plot.

Deepwater had a lot of creepy, stylish, music-video type moments. The camera work was beautiful, and once you get to the end of the movie, the style of these sequences makes even more sense. I didn't feel like these scenes took away from the dramatic moments which were the core of the movie.

The director answered questions afterwards, and I was surprised to hear him talking about how low the budget was. He described some of what he would have done with a bigger budget, but I found myself wondering if the small budget helped force them to really focus the story. It's too late this year, but after seeing Deepwater I'm going to make sure I see more films at next year's festival.