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Sex, or intimate feelings towards another person, seems to be
the hallmark of a good thriller. Just look at the past year: The Pledge equated
Jack Nicholson's obsession with finding a serial killer to his inability to get laid. Memento
had Guy Pearce using his dead wife to justify his murderous rage. And With a
Friend Like Harry made Laurent Lucas face some of his more feminine uderpinings in
light of his psycho pal from high school. Since most of us in the audience do not know
what it's like to worry about the dead body under our house from being found by the
police, the best way to connect to the masses is by weaving it around humanity's most
insecure and anxious form of communication. Yes, sexual feelings are the scariest
things that most people will ever have to face other than death. And some of us
choose to treat sex like it is a dead body under the house. The Deep End understands
this and uses it as a springboard to lift off. The surface tells of a mother who will do ANYTHING
to protect her family from the grips of evil. Underneath this, or to look Deep-er
if you will, there is a story about characters needing to confront the bards of their
emotions.
Swinton play Margaret Hall, a Reno housewife who
has to watch over Grandpa and the kids while husband is out to sea. Margaret's biggest
problem is that her son Beau (Tucker) is hanging out with a rough bunch of guys in town.
He's also having sex with them, which adds another layer to Ma's distress. One night at
the house, she discovers Beau's new boyfriend lying face down in the lake.She goes about
hiding the body, which really functions as a way of hiding her son's homosexuality. Then,
just when things start to look like they'll go off without a hitch, Alec (Visnjic) shows
up with a little too much information about all of this and a demand worthy of blackmail.
Not much can be said after that without giving anything away, but let's just say that Mary
and Alec start to understand one another on a level far above professional extortion.
The whole thrust of the film is about how people
handle sex when it begins to bubble out of the cauldron. I didn't see Mary's concern about
Beau's predicament as homophobic but simply as the fear that any mother would have who has
to watch her child enter the dangerous realm of intimacy. The pain that Swinton conveys in
her eyes alone can only make her witnessing the loss of innocence all the more dificult.
And the only thing I know about Goran Visnjic is that my female pal accompanying me to
this referred to him as the" hottie from ER." But he has the almost
unseen ability to convey menace and sympathy at the very same moment. Not too bad for a
"hottie" if I say so myself. It must have something to do with how his
eyes can express things while her words say something entirely different. Already, I can
say this guy has the potential to lap George Clooney at the same point in such an early
stage in his career. Above all, the film tells its story in a clever way. The directors
use a lot of water whenever characters need to submerge the truth or whenever they need to
be cleansed. Margaret wears some pretty drabby clothes until Alec shows up, then red seems
to be the only hue in her collection. This exploration of desire and fear is at the core
of The Deep End and makes all of the events in the film feel more like a family
drama than a tantalizing thriller.
But screw all of that because it is a
tantalizing thriller. It'll make you jump and it never requires the audience to take any
major leaps of logic. Indeed, the film shows even minor details and creates a pace that is
very similar to that of The Score. The Deep End is a film that allows
itself that to get in under the audience's skin through an emotional complexity and a
skilled way of storytelling. If you get tired of the pained contrition of parlor-trick
flicks like The Others, get yourself out of the kiddie pool and down to the local
arts-plex for a dose of real psycho-tension. It may make you a bit insecure, but at least
you can respect yourself in the morning.
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