When I originally wrote a review of this film back in August of last year, I started off by saying:
"The Deep End" may be a low-budget independent film with little chance of box office success, but there is one thing that I'm willing to bet on. And that is that Tilda Swinton will get an academy award nomination. Looking at what little quality women's roles we’ve seen so far this year, and looking at what is coming up this year, I strongly doubt that we will see five performances better than her's in the winter months.

Well, now that the Academy Awards have come and gone, I'm willing to say that she was robbed. For although she did get a Golden Globe nomination, she was better than at least two of the actresses who were only nominated for best actress.

Swinton plays the wife of a man who is out to sea for long periods of time, and the mother of a gay son who has lately been influenced by a low life character. We understand that she is very protective of her son in the opening scenes where she is telling Darby (the low life) to stay away from her son, who is willing to, but only for a payment of $5000. This guy makes her worry because recently he and her son were in a drunk driving accident, and she is sure he would never do something like that under ordinary circumstances. Instead of staying away, he sneaks down to their house to speak with her son privately, but things don’t work out, and the next morning Swinton finds herself trying to hide a body and cover up a crime. At least that is what she thinks she is doing.

Like a less complicated version of the great "Blood Simple", this act soon snowballs into trying to cover up more and more evidence and deal with more loose ends than she would have thought possible. New crimes are committed, blackmail is threatened, and other family emergencies get in her way. Plot-wise, this is actually a very simple film. A lesser film would have had a plot full of complicated twist and turns, but "The Deep End" instead focuses on a fairly simple act, and some logical follow-ups that compound to early mistakes.

I don't know if I want to pick on the movie too much for this, but I don't think they should have shown us what really happened to Darby. If we had seen them fight, the son came back in the house, and then the mother discovered the body, it could have perhaps worked stronger as a thriller. Instead we are bothered by the fact that the mother is doing all these things that may not be necessary. Another way to look at this though is to see that she never even thought to question the son. Her first instinct was to act. In other words, to protect him.

Yet, like the classic "Blood Simple" of 15 years ago, the movie may have wanted to be one where we feel the irony of committing all these 'crimes' to cover up what never really was one. Another theory is that this is a household used to keeping secrets from one another. Beau's homosexuality is never really mentioned or brought up, and I wouldn't be surprised if it is the type of thing the mother only realized after the car accident.

Not long afterwards, Swinton is surprised to receive a visit not from the police, but from Goran Visnjic (of TV’s "E.R."). He shows up as the middleman for a blackmailer who thinks he can get $50,000 out of this woman. Neither he nor his boss even imagined that she or her son really killed Darby. But his boss does have a sex videotape between her son and Darby, which is enough to think that they can scare some money out of her.

One of the film's problems is that it comes close to fitting certain types of genres, but never quite reaching it. It is almost a thriller, but because we know more than the characters do, it doesn't really work that way. We also can tell that Goran has no intention of hurting this woman, so the threat of danger to the family is far less than it could be. The movie most interestingly is also almost a romance, but not quite.

Goran falls for Swinton, but not when they first met. It was clear he didn't want to even deal in any sort of threatening way with her, or with a woman in general. When he first shows up at the door with the videotape, he repeatedly says that he wants to speak with the father, Tom. She says he isn't available (because he is on a Carrier in the Atlantic Ocean), and he says he'll wait. Once she’s explained how long of a wait that will be, he has no chance but to deal with her. It is clear all his self-pumping up he did to act threatening subsides as he calmly explains the blackmail in a very business like way. Don’t get me wrong. He does threaten her, but more politely than he probably had intended to do with the father.

In a later masterpiece of a scene, we see him help save the grandfather, who has suffered a heart attack on one of his return visits. All the participants act just right. He wants to have a dangerous demeanor, but he also doesn't want the man to die. I feel that even before this point he also doesn't want to do anything that would make Swinton unhappy. After the previous encounter he began to fall for her, and we can really hear it in his voice when speaking with his boss, Nagel, who is really the man behind the scenes doing the threatening.

A less realistic film would have had a romance. This film does not. But a near-kiss in an auto at the end of the film was tantalizing in how close it was.

Another very interesting character in the film is Swinton's daughter, Paige. We see that she works on all the family cars and she is also a ballet dancer. A cop watching her work on her mom's car mentions that she would make a great wife to somebody. She perhaps represented what Tilden was earlier in her life. A strong woman who eventually settled down and became a soccer mom.

One character that didn't work well enough for me was the crime boss, Nagel. He wasn't intimidating enough. We should have seen him as a dangerous person. I thought the daughter could have handled him if he angered her.

I think a little more time could have been spent with the son. We didn’t get very much back story regarding his music career. I think they wanted us to think that he 'had a future' that the mother was protecting, but I'm not sure. I wish we had at least one heart to heart between mother and son to give us some insight into their relationship. She seemed close to him, but he seemed to want to get away to study college back East. He also seemed a little weak, which is a surprise considering how much stronger everyone in the family was. For most of the film, he thinks that the blackmailer is someone his mom is having an affair with. He is clearly bothered by this, but never even has a talk with her about it.

Another problem I had with the film is that anyone who lives near, has visited, or has even heard the legends about the volcanic Lake Tahoe where the story takes place, is the scene where a body is dumped into the water. It was necessary to have the body land in shallow water for a later scene, but since Tahoe’s bottom has never been reached, one would think that an inhabitant of that area could easily have dumped the body far from shore where it would never be found. It was obvious later why it was done, but seeing the movie in a Tahoe-familiar crowd caused little chuckles to happen throughout the theater.

The movie is filled with symbolism, but really of only one thing: Water. Water is so symbolic of danger here that it is practically a character by itself. I'm amazed no one drowned during the entire film. A man collapses carrying bottled water. We keep seeing the lead character through a fish tank, or glass, for almost the entire film. Every new director tries to show off one new original shot. In this one, we get the perfect timing of a drop of water dripping out of a faucet and through it, warped and upside down, but completely recognizable is a woman coming in through a door, just as the drop falls from the faucet.

This film works because we care about the character, and we can imagine ourselves trying to think of what to do next as she does. It is a little reminiscent of "Psycho", where we are rooting for the mother to succeed as she covers up each additional crime.

As a side note, this story was based on an old book, and it was filmed in 1949 by Max Ophuls as "The Reckless Moment". There was no homosexuality, and the son was a daughter, but the story is the same.


Note: On my own web page I gave the film only 3½ stars.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older