The Deep End

THE DEEP END

Rating: B-

For a psychological thriller, this film isn't all that psychologically thrilling. Instead, its strong points are good acting by lead Tilda Swinton, and a storyline which manages to steer clear of the usual clichés even as it plumbs very familiar territory.

First of all, it's pretty obvious that Swinton is the same person who has appeared in other movies as actress "Cate Blanchett." Not only do they look like identical twins, but Blanchett, you may remember, starred in a film called The Gift, where she played the mother of three kids entangled in a plot about a murdered person's body being dumped in a lake. Here, Swinton plays the mother of three kids entangled in a plot about a murdered person's body being dumped in a lake. I suppose you're going to tell me this is just a coincidence?

At any rate, Blanchett (or "Swinton," if you insist) has three children and a house on Lake Tahoe, and an absentee husband who's off somewhere in the North Atlantic bombing the Iraqis. Her eldest, Beau (Jonathan Tucker), is seventeen, and at that awkward age where he's beginning to experiment with sex. Particularly upsetting to Swinton is that his experiments don't involve women, if you catch my drift. (That's what she gets for giving the kid a stupid name like "Beau" in the first place. Good grief.) When Beau and his lover (Josh Lucas) have a spat in the boathouse, Lucas accidentally impales himself on an anchor (not an easy thing to do, but he manages). Mom stumbles upon the body the next morning. She could call the police, but heck, where would the challenge be in that? Instead, she stuffs the corpse in her motorboat and dumps it in Lake Tahoe, thus turning a minor problem into a major mess. Does she pick a deep part of the lake, where the body is sure to remain hidden, or does she choose a region so shallow you can see the body from the surface? Take a guess. No sooner does she think "Could things possibly suck any worse?" then Goran Visnjic appears on her doorstep to blackmail her with a compromising videotape of her son and Lucas in the kind of performance that doesn't air during primetime (yet). All this just because she named the kid "Beau."

Believe it or not, that's only the setup for the rest of the movie. The writer/director/producer team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel takes this somewhat standard fare and infuses some new ideas into it. Sometimes, they work admirably well, such as when Visnjic shows up at Swinton's house at a very inopportune moment. Other times, the story just seems bent on straining its own credibility, particularly with regard to the behavior of Visnjic and Swinton in later scenes. The ending leaves a lot of misunderstandings in the mother-son relationship which probably should've been cleared up, and the filmmakers' skills at evoking tension and suspense could stand some polishing. With that regard, it would be fair to say that McGehee and Siegel focus too much on their characters, at the expense of their story.