`THE DEEP END' Rated R, 99 minutes; directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel WHEN, WHERE: Now playing at De Vargas Center; Call 988-2775 for showtimes
Kids have no idea who their parents are or what they go through. Parents are a natural resource, like air or television, indispensable but hardly worth much thought. In the taut new thriller `The Deep End', the great Scottish actress Tilda Swinton (`Orlando') plays Margaret Hall, a Lake Tahoe mom who juggles laundry, shopping, fixing meals, driving the kids to practice, and covering up an apparent murder with such nervy aplomb that none of her three kids tumbles that there's anything unusual going on.. But as the deceased-to-be points out to her oldest, `She's a mother, not a moron.'
Writer-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel (`Suture') have taken Elizabeth Sanxay Holding's ‘40s novel The Blank Wall (previously filmed in '49 by Max Ophuls as `The Reckless Moment') and updated it, introducing a homosexual element for contemporary relevance into what is essentially an old-fashioned woman's melodrama in the Joan Crawford/Barbara Stanwyck tradition. 17-year-old Beau (Jonathan Tucker) has fallen into a relationship with Darby (Josh Lucas), a decadently charming thirty-ish sleazebag who is leading him into corrupt ways. As the movie opens, Beau has already been an auto accident with Darby, and Margaret, who disapproves of the relationship without being absolutely certain of its nature and extent, beards the creep in his lair, a shady club called The Deep End, and tells him to stay away from her boy.
The plot thickens when Darby turns up dead in the shallows by the Halls' boathouse. Mothers like to think the best of their kids, but they suspect the worst. Margaret jumps to the conclusion that Beau has done to Darby what she would like to have done to him. She disposes of the body and the deceased's car without even asking any questions, and by the time she does get a better picture of what might actually have happened, she is well down a road that permits no backing up. Then the plot thickens some more, adding blackmail and betrayal and even an off-beat sort of romance to its darkening brew.
`The Deep End' is awash in water imagery, great (the adjacent Lake Tahoe), greater (Margaret's absent husband is a naval officer off at sea), small (a fishtank), and smaller (a room refracted through a drop swelling from a faucet), and it sometimes goes a little overboard. Cinematographer Giles Nuttgens shoots the movie elegantly with a cool palette of underwater washes, punctuated with strong color only in the bright reds of Margaret's coat and the blackmailer's car, but once or twice jarring daylight seeps in from outdoors during a night scene. There is something a shade improbable in the character of the blackmailer with a heart of gold (a moodily charismatic and outrageously handsome Goran Visnjic of `E.R.'), and a climactic scene between him and Margaret loses its footing on the slippery slope of melodrama. But none of the occasional missteps derail the mounting tension. As the plot swirls along, the filmmakers keep flinging setbacks at Margaret's feet like marbles, but she dodges them doggedly and keeps on coming.
McGehee and Siegel keep turning the screws and ratcheting up the suspense, but they know as well as we do that none of it would be worth a tinker's dam were it not for the Oscar-caliber performance of Tilda Swinton, who conveys ordinariness stretched to the breaking point. Swinton is one of the best actresses practically nobody has ever seen, and here she grabs hold of us from the first moment with her sharp, pale face erased of anything but fierce, nervous resolve. Peter Donat (seen here on stage last month in The Cherry Orchard) is good as the doddering father-in-law, and Raymond Barry provides muscular badness as the blackmailer's partner. Tucker adds a gutsy low-keyed portrayal of the troubled teenage son that avoids the pitfalls of exaggeration, and he and Swinton create a moving chemistry from the moment when the son finally awakens to the possibility that his mother may actually have a life and a few secrets of her own.
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