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| Writing/directing team Scott McGehee and David Siegel |
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| Scott McGehee |
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| David Siegel |
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| Tilda Swinton on the set |
THE DEEP END A- USA (101 mi) 2001 ‘Scope d: Scott McGehee and David Siegel
Among the early film appearances of Tilda Swinton following her work with English artist and experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman in the 80’s and 90’s, starring in Sally Potter’s ORLANDO (1992), also Tim Roth’s The War Zone (1999) and David Mackenzie’s Young Adam (2002), but this is the film that put her on the map, a stylishly made atmospheric neo-noir murder mystery that is a remake of Max Ophüls’ last Hollywood film, The Reckless Moment (1949), which was about the hidden crime of slavery within a family, and by extension within society, with two major departures from the original, the transformation of the rebellious teenage daughter into a teenage gay son, while the subject of race is left out entirely by removing the character of the black maid. This remake also lacks the sophisticated irony of Ophüls, a subversive trademark of his work. Both films are adapted from American novelist and short story writer Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall, first appearing as a story in The Ladies Homes Journal in 1947. Holding is a suspense writer who excelled at the exploration of domestic unease, a favorite of both Hitchcock and Raymond Chandler, though this film reinterprets the blankness of “the blank wall” in a new way, as the female lead protagonist, a soccer mom, discovers her comfortable middle-class life is built on a lie, yet her awareness is tied to the terror of existence, a terror emanating from the metaphysical void lying beneath the surface in “the deep end” of ordinary life. Film noir peaked in the 1940’s, with a focus on crime, corruption, and a cynical look at humanity, though they tend to be thrillers, crime dramas, or gangster films, emphasizing an imagery of shadows drawn from an earlier era of German Expressionist cinema. Typically they tend to get more existential, often exploring a suffocating isolation of humanity and the claustrophobic nature of our limited existence. McGehee and Siegel are a San Francisco writing/directing/producing team, kind of like the Coen brothers, or the Dardennes, probably the only partnership of longevity which isn’t romantic or fraternal, but neither attended film school, nonetheless McGehee has a PhD in Japanese cinema from Berkeley and Siegel is a trained architect, yet American postwar melodramas had an enormous impact upon them, updating a 40’s women’s melodrama into their own modernist noir style, where David is straight while Scott is openly gay. That figures prominently in their rewrite, as historically gay characters in fiction and film are routinely killed off in short order, bringing a complex history of cinematic gay panic to the idea of having a closeted gay child, where the protective mothering goes into overdrive here, escalating to heroic proportions as Margaret Hall (Tilda Swinton in one of her finest performances) bravely tries to protect her family at home while her husband is off commanding an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, forcing her to discover a new strength in herself, a sense of power she had not known before. Emphatically resonating is the cinematic flourish from British cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, who worked with Scottish filmmaker David Mackenzie on Young Adam (2002), HALLAM FOE (2007), and Hell or High Water (2016), while the setting is magnificent, beautifully shot in Lake Tahoe, the same place as THE GODFATHER (1972, 1974), featuring wide expansive shots of the breathtaking vistas while Swinton has an extraordinary ability to also work in close-ups, where structures are revealed with complete clarity, concentrating on closed compositions, isolating the protagonists in closely-confined spaces, elegantly capturing an upscale residence along the lake, where the placid tranquility of the water is actually a mirage, as an overwhelming sense of dread lurks under the surface, something this film shares with Sean Penn’s The Pledge (2001) and Todd Fields’ In the Bedroom (2001). In a subversion of noir, many of the most psychologically intense moments occur in the bright sunshine, and while Swinton is not your typical femme fatale, exhibiting a strong moral fiber as opposed to emotional damage, she is an otherwise decent character who is driven into the moral abyss of a seedy underworld, yet her femme fatale appearance in a bright red coat late in the film causes even her son to do a doubletake.
Something of a psychological thriller where Margaret is forced to reckon with the idea of being a woman alone, she is stripped of her identity as a mother or housewife, suddenly confronted with a chilly existential emptiness when the walls of middle-class comfort come crashing down, as her bourgeois home comes under siege from a blackmailer, Alek Spera (Goran Višnjić), leaving her exposed and on her own, where her terrifying moments of isolation are the most chilling moments of the film. Sexually repressed, half a globe away from her husband, and incapable of openly discussing the subject of homosexuality, yet just as driven to keep this from her husband, Margaret’s role as a woman and mother is put through the emotional wringer. Two worlds collide, the natural blue water of the lake surrounded by green alpine forests, and the urban corruption and manufactured sins from the gambling city of Reno, where Margaret goes to confront Darby Reese (Josh Lucas), the unsavory owner of a gay nightclub known as The Deep End, where the décor is like being inside an aquarium, warning him to stay away from her teenage son Beau (Jonathan Tucker). But when she finds Reese’s body along the beach outside her house the next morning, the gears of her brain start wondering how to deal with a corpse whose presence could destroy her family, as a rush of adrenaline from a sense of panic sets in, uncertain what role her son played in his death, but she assumes he had something to do with it, so she does everything she can to conceal the body and protect her son, where her cool composure under intense pressure is quite literally shocking. Wrapping the body in a tarp, she drives her small dinghy across the lake to a peaceful cove and dumps it, surrounded only by water and empty sky, though by dumping the still visible body in shallow water, the film emphasizes the thin line that separates secrets from exposure, a key underlying theme. Surprised to see his shiny blue Corvette parked outside afterwards, she’s forced to take a second trip across the lake and dive for the missing car keys still attached to his body, becoming more desperate and increasingly dangerous, finding herself alone in the middle of nowhere, before successfully driving the car back to Reno. While all of this kicks into motion, she also has to look after her three kids, fixing them lunches and dinners, getting them to sports activities and ballet and music lessons (her daughter is a ballet dancer and car mechanic), while also looking after her elderly father-in-law, Jack (Peter Donat), without arousing suspicions, yet conversations are constantly interrupted or fail to materialize altogether. Accustomed to emergencies, she feels frustrated by her inability to handle the volatile nature of her son, who is exploring his own identity issues, yet both skate around the subject, where both mother and son assume the other committed the murder. Adding more fuel to the fire is an unexpected visit from a lurking blackmailer who produces one naughty X-rated video of her son that links him to the dead man, footage Reese secretly shot himself, which she’s cruelly forced to watch, something no mother should have to witness, leaving her with an overriding sense of helplessness. For $50,000, he promises to make it go away, otherwise he will hand the tape over to police, implicating Beau in the murder, suggesting it’s merely a business proposition, as they were apparently blackmailing Reese before his unfortunate demise, so now they’re simply transferring his debt onto her.
According to Roger Ebert in his review, The Deep End movie review & film summary (2001), “Tilda Swinton is the key. She is always believable as this harassed, desperate, loving mother. She projects a kind of absorption in her task; she juggles blackmail, murder, bank loans, picking up the kids after school—it’s as if the ordinary tasks keep her sane enough to deal with the dangers that surround her.” In one scene we see Margaret swimming laps in a pool, hoping to escape the terrors of the present, reaching the pool’s edge gasping for breath, as if she is drowning, mirroring her excursion on the lake, where the physical and emotional demands are taking their toll, feeling overwhelmed and under constant assault, yet leaving no family trace of the exasperation she is experiencing. Her desperate attempt to raise the requested money fails for a variety of reasons, none looming larger than the bank requires her husband’s signature for a withdrawal of that magnitude, and, of course, he’s completely inaccessible. Beau is already in over his head, having just barely survived a drunk driving car wreck with Reese, which sent alarm bells flashing for his mother, and now she’s hiding a corpse. He’s just a kid applying for musical scholarships at prestigious universities, where these adolescent decisions could adversely affect his entire life, and while she may want to respect his privacy, she’s forced to tiptoe around the parent-child boundary lines, never confronting him directly. “He’s just a friend, that’s all,” Beau insists, not knowing she’s already seen damning evidence. These roles reverse near the end of the film, with Margaret suggesting Spera is “a friend, just a friend,” though Beau suspects otherwise. A life-altering event happens in between, as Jack suffers a heart attack on the floor of their home that brings him to the precipice of death, with Spera simultaneously arriving to collect the money she doesn’t have, only to see her sprawled on the floor administering mouth-to-mouth, screaming for help, with Spera applying CPR chest compressions that actually save his live. Coincidentally, Višnjić also played a dashingly handsome emergency room doctor on the television show ER for ten years from 1999 to 2009. Their relationship goes through a surprising transformation, having been brought into her life in such an intimate and personalized manner, creating underlying sexual tension, which is a fundamental contradiction for any blackmailer, and the irony is not lost on either of them. Spera develops a heightened appreciation for the position he is putting her in, aware of her entrapment, drawing an explicit parallel with his own entrapment in criminality, where he’s a foot soldier in a larger criminal enterprise run by Carlie Nagle (Raymond J. Barry), who’s only interested in getting his money, using blunt force if necessary, convinced she is lying about not being able to raise the money. This all comes to a head in the boathouse, exactly where Beau and Reese had their earlier tussle, exploding with the same kind of senseless violence that spins even further into the void of darkness, resulting in a horrific accident, with Beau witnessing his mother’s intense anguish, changing his perception of her forever. This neo-noir thriller unearths moral implications of repressed sexuality and muted familial communication, yet the sexual theme creates an unusual bond between mother and son, bringing them closer together, while keeping it a secret from their absent father who would not understand, as Beau moves from teenage resentment to an adult capable of understanding her as a person, not simply as his mother. This is a movie about secrets and their unintended consequences, creating elaborate ambiguities, contradictions, and misunderstandings, where the sudden violent death that drives the plot could not have happened and would not have had the same consequences without the specific dynamics of this family. In the end we are left wondering whether those dynamics can ever be the same again.
