The Deep End
**1/2
Cinema
Releases - December 14, 2001
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. 127
minutes. Directed by John Madden. Written by Shawn Slovo; from the novel
by Louis de Bernieres. Starring Nicolas Cage, Penelope Cruz, John Hurt, Christian
Bale, David Morrissey.
"The Deep End" wants to be the story
of an ordinary woman getting tangled up in terrible and dangerous situations,
and it has a lot of good ideas. But the structure undermines the possibility
for tension -- the filmmakers don't seem to realise that to create the feeling
of falling into a deep end, they've got to start with a shallow
end.
Tilda Swinton stars as a Nevada homemaker whose
father-in-law lives in the spare room, whose husband is away on manoeuvres
with the navy, and whose teenage son is having an affair with a seedy older
man. One night the son and the boyfriend fight in the boathouse, the son
storms back into the house, the boyfriend ends up slipping and killing himself,
and in the morning Swinton finds the body, assumes her son has killed the
man, and takes measures to hide the body and protect her son.
There is a great stretch of filmmaking at this
point, whereby Swinton decides to hide the body by loading it into her speedboat,
driving to a quiet stretch of lake and jumping into the water to make sure
the evidence gets properly hidden. The situation is so isolated, so uncertain,
so hazardous, so surreal, that it captures the essence of a
nightmare.
New plot points emerge throughout "The Deep End",
and I'm being vague to avoid spoiling them. The problem is that most of the
interesting things happen in the first half of the movie, and all through
the second hour it's pretty obvious that things are going to turn out okay.
A thriller about normal people in peril should be agonising and ever more
complicated -- instead, "The Deep End" is anticlimactic, getting simpler
as it proceeds and finishing all too quickly.
One of the obvious structural flaws comes in the
first scene, which sees Swinton going to the workplace of the son's boyfriend
to confront him about his disruptive influence. We're introduced to Swinton
as an uncommonly perceptive and brave woman, when there should be at least
twenty previous minutes establishing her as a normal person. We learn about
her daily routine after the plot has begun moving, so instead of
introducing deadly situations to a normal environment, the screenplay is
doing a clumsy job of establishing mood.
"The Deep End" is well made from a technical
standpoint, and at no point is it boring, but I kept thinking it should be
grabbing me more than it was. Tilda Swinton has been tipped for an Oscar
nomination, and indeed she does have striking presence -- it's just not the
right presence for this story. So it is with everything around her --
interesting, not effective.
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
2001 Reviews
(alphabetical)
2001 Reviews (by star
rating)
Archive of all cinema reviews
(alphabetical)
Review Archive
Index
UK
Critic main page
|
![[Image]](http://www.ukcritic.com/posbanr2.gif)