THE DEEP END

Victor Bloom MD

There's an excellent movie showing exclusively at the Main theater in Royal Oak. It may turn out to be one of the best of the year, a year noted by a lot of dogs and flops. It is melodramatic and sophisticated, well acted and directed, with a story taken from a novel that is a small classic, a 1947 crime novel, "The Blank Wall," by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding. It was filmed before in 1949 by Max Ophuls as "The Reckless Moment," with James Mason and Joan Bennett, a dark drama in which one complication piles on after another with dark coincidences adding to suspense and mystery.

What captures our imagination and involvement is that we can identify with a nice family in a handsome home on the shores of Lake Tahoe, Nevada. It could almost be Lake St. Clair. The mother could be one of any number of Grosse Pointe women who is doing her best with a family of three and an aged, quirky father-in-law. Her husband away at sea on a secret mission, an admiral in charge of an aircraft carrier. He is in effect incommunicado when she desperately needs his help in a rather drastic home situation.

The film opens with a young boy cleaning out an aquarium tank with a garden hose. That is the beginning of the theme of water, of underwater, of fish, fishing for toys, ultimately fishing for a set of keys in a body under the water. The deep end is both figurative and literal, as she has found it necessary to dispose of a body she thinks her son has killed.

As anyone can see, there is a Hitchcockian juxtaposition of the everyday normal and the bizarre, with events that are shocking and horrifying. We follow the path of a mother who is trying to protect her teenage son from hanging around bad company, something any Grosse Pointe mother would try to do. Beau (Jonathan Tucker) is a nice boy, a talented musician with a scholarship on the way, but like most high school seniors, resists mother's good advice and wants to experiment and tempt fate. He drives to Reno and makes friends with a dangerous person. The mother goes into the lion's den and tells the handsome and charming Darby (Josh Lucas) to stay away from her boy. He smiles and says he will for five thousand dollars.

He pays an unexpected visit to Beau that night. Darby is gay and plays with the young man, telling him of his mother's visit, lying about the demand for money. He is drunk, they fight, the boy goes home and Darby stumbles off the pier and onto an anchor which pierces his chest and kills him. The mother thinks Beau killed him and tries to hide the body to protect her son. The audience has the facts but the characters in the story are steeped in ignorance, not knowing them. The body is found and there is an investigation, and complications ensue as an accomplice of the dead man now seeks to extort $50,000 to destroy a videotape which shows the son in a compromised position. It's all part of a sinister, criminal plan.

She is desperate to somehow come up with the cash, but she has kids to pick up at school, laundry to do and her father-in-law has a heart attack and she attempts to do CPR and is failing in the task. The extortionist, Alek Spera (Goran Visnjic) is expert at it and helps her, saving his life. The mother, Margaret Hall (Tilda Swinson) is torn between gratitude, hate and desperation. She can't quite raise the money, Alek compromises and seeing her quiet strength and devotion, gradually falls in love with her and tries to come to her aid against the more sinister force.

There is yet another killing, another body to hide, and somehow, miraculously, things come out right. The plot uncovers one surprise after another, one insurmountable problem after another and the character development and relationships deepen and become ever more complex. The relationship between the mother and the extortionist is the central axis of the film and the acting of both is outstanding, the denouement exceedingly touching and moving.

Swinton's performance as the harried and devoted mother is probably her best to date, after being in one extraordinary movie after another. In "Orlando," she was a man who became a woman and lived for four centuries. In "Love is the Devil," she presided over London's most notorious drinking club. In "The War Zone," she was a pregnant wife in a family harboring dark secrets. In this film the power of her acting comes through in understatement, containment and restraint, one which gives the audience only slight indication of the intensity of her underlying feelings.

It's an Academy Award film for the movie itself, for fine acting, story, photography, editing, and may turn out to be the best film of the year.

Dr Bloom is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Wayne State University School of Medicine. He is a member of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and on the editorial board of the Wayne County Medical Society. He welcomes comments at his email address--- vbloom@comcast.net.