With bags of clever tricks slung over their shoulders, Scott McGhee and David Siegel III, the co-directors of "The Deep End," have made the best American movie I've seen this year.
This gripping thriller unravels with a refreshing, unhurried sophistication. The story begins as Margaret Hall (Tilda Swinton) arrives in Reno to confront Darby Reese (Josh Lucas), her 17-year-old son's older lover. Darby refuses to stop seeing Beau (Jonathan Tucker, "The Virgin Suicides") unless Margaret pays him $5,000. She refuses.
That night, Darby comes to Beau's house at Lake Tahoe and lures him to the boathouse. The drunk Darby wants sex, while Beau is angry that Darby would offer to cease their trysts for cash. A fight ensues.
The next morning, Margaret finds the body of Darby, who has apparently been murdered. She assumes that her son is guilty, and with the protective instinct of a mother bear, she loads the body into a motor boat and dumps it on the other side of the lake.
Of course, we do not live happily ever after. The body causes Margaret increasingly complex problems, the worst of which is Alec (Goran Visnjic of "ER"), a man with a videotape of Beau and Darby's lovemaking, which, if the police get a hold of it, would inspire an investigation. Alec demands $50,000 for the tape. Margaret, already emotionally exhausted by her cover-up, tries to comply.
From there, the film unfolds in the patient style of Hitchcock's classics. Margaret is a typical Hitchcockian protagonist: an innocent person with the best intentions who has been thrown down a rabbit hole of deception, torment and murder. "The Deep End" even employs Hitchcock's quiet humor when Visnjic's character uses CPR to save Margaret's father-in-law. The CPR is performed with such ease that it is clear he has used it before, possibly even on network television.
Swanson holds the film's emotional center with her utterly convincing turn as a mother more devoted to her son more than to logic or the law. Her face, often frozen like a stunned statuette with mouth agape, reveals that her life will never resettle back into her familial contentment. This event has changed her forever, though her housewifely duties remain the same, including music lessons, after-school pickup and making meatloaf.
Swinton's delicate features express more than just her maternal instinct but also her detachment from her navy-admiral husband who is away at sea, her live-in father-in-law, her carpool partners and her lifestyle as a whole. Thus, she is not only trapped by the Darby cover-up, but also ensnared in the restricting life of housewifery.
The most refreshing thing about this suburban film noir is that it doesn't have the wink-wink, nudge-nudge irony of most modern installments of the genre. So many movies-"American Beauty" being a good, if overly praised, example-use parody and exaggeration of the bourgeois lifestyle in order to question or undermine it.
Instead, "The Deep End" uses poignant, probing cinematography with a painter's attention to color that has rarely graced the American screen since the heyday of auteur-driven films like "The Godfather" and "Taxi Driver." Rather than "American Beauty"'s cliched use of roses as a symbol of suburban superficiality, "The Deep End" hints at the latent discomfort of suburban life by drenching the entire movie with somber grays, blues and greens. The cinematographer, Giles Nuttgens, makes every surface hauntingly bleak.
Color, as well as Lake Tahoe itself, are used and filmed so masterfully, that they seem to play their own roles-almost their own characters-in the movie. When Margaret, with her dull red hair, puts on a bright red coat for another money drop-off, she is implicitly connected to Alec, in his red car. It is the artistry in the production of this predictable story that makes it timeless and compelling.
The eerie tension of "The Deep End" does not come from mockery or excessive violence but from slow-moving shots through wavy windows and frame-slicing blinds, from chilling images of a fish tank and a leaky faucet's disquieting drip. These unsettling compositions, and Swanson's hauntingly expressive face, linger with the viewer long after the credits roll.