Deepwater

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.

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.

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.

After recovering from a twisted ankle, the drifter Nat Banyon (Lucas Black) hitchhikes on the road, trying to reach Wyoming, where he dreams on having an ostrich farm. However he has an incident in a bar and he steals a car from the guy that was beating him. He heads to Wyoming, but he sees a car accident and he saves the driver Herman Finch (Peter Coyote), who owns the Deepwater Hotel. While spending the night in the hotel, Nat is arrested by the police, but Finch releases him from jail and proposes Nat to paint his hotel. In return, he gives an old blue Chrysler Newport to Nat, and lodges and feeds him in the hotel. While painting the hotel, Nat becomes obsessed on Finch's wife Iris (Mia Maestro) and discovers that Finch is a loan shark and corrupt. Further, he has a scheme with the car dealer Walnut (Michael Ironside) and his partner and with the Indian Joe Littlefeet (John Boncore) in the local casino and is protected by the corrupt police of Deepwater. After the mysterious death of a local and a policeman that had issues with Finch, Nat decides to leave Deepwater; but Iris seduces him and convinces Nat to travel after a box match promoted by Finch and stealing a large amount from the safe. On the day of the fight, Nat discovers the hidden secret in Deepwater.

"Deepwater" is a surprisingly great thriller that uses elements of film- noir and a twist that slightly recalls "Identity". The plot is supported by an excellent screenplay; great debut in the direction of the unknown David S. Marfield; top-notch performances of Lucas Black and Peter Coyote, supported by the veterans Michael Ironside and Lesley Ann Warren and the sexy and gorgeous Mia Maestro. The totally unexpected twist is a huge surprise that explains the flaws I believed there were in the story. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Deepwater, A Cidade do Medo" ("Deepwater, The City of the Fear")

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.