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The Deep EndRating:
Release Date: 04 February, 2003 Retail Price: $9.98 OUR Price: $9.98 You SAVE: $0.00! Cast: Complete Cast (5 total) |
The Deep End Reviews
A Fine Romance
This movie tends to be like the musical score that opens it and weaves through it - simultaneously haunting and irritating.
Deep End is essentially a two-character play, an intimate dance between a protective mother and her blackmailer. The haunting element is the unexpected, rare fondness that develops unspoken between these two. Their relationship is reminiscent of the saving tenderness and respect that grows between the characters played by Audrey Hepburn and Richard Crenna in Wait Until Dark.
We feel this blackmailer's inclination to be better than his deeds early on, when he is left briefly alone in his victim's house. We can see him being touched by the order and goodness of the home Margaret has made for her absentee husband and her son. It makes me ache to realize how seldom such quiet appreciation happens in real life. I can hardly imagine a door-to-door salesman being diverted from his strictly commercial manipulations by anything he sees in a house. How much less likely it is that a blackmailer would pause to be charmed by his victim. But then, that's the poetic license we go to movies to find.
The irritating part of the movie could be the result of a bad editing job. Parts of the movie seem to be missing. For the first quarter of the film, I was distracted by wondering who the older man living in the household was. I may have missed the explanation that he was a grandfather. However, I don't think the puzzling gaps in the relationship between the blackmailer and Margaret were due to my having missed anything. At one point, Margaret refers to the blackmailer's gambling debts. How did she know he even had a penchant for gambling? In the only meetings they presumably have, they are not shown exchanging much personal information at all. The viewer gets the feeling that some crucial scenes definitely got left on the cutting room floor.
This is too bad, because the main value of this movie lies in its delicate quality of blossoming in the shade. We would like to understand more of what lay at the root of the blackmailer's absorption with the person who started out to be only a job to him. Tilda Swinton, the actress who plays the role of mother, seems too spare and monochromatic to inspire such a reversal, without our seeing more of an interaction between the two.
However, the haunting, touching aspects of the film very much outweigh its lapses.
I hope we will get to see Goran Visnjic in more big-screen roles. He makes an indelible impression as a man whose shining impulses can't find expression in such a dull, opaque world.
crappy story, should've gotten a slightly prettier actress
The many many plot holes in this movie have already been expounded on in other reviews so I won't repeat them here. I do have a few comments to make though.
When the movie is already so bad, it sure doesn't help the entertainment factor when the lead actress is not very easy on the eyes. As shallow as that sounds, it's still not as shallow as the place she decided to hide the body, which was idiotic. Her acting seemed dry as well. I've never seen so many nonsensical character motives in a movie. They were nothing but lazy plot devices that weren't justified. Ok, so there's a certain story you wanna tell on screen no matter what. Fine, but please justify it with some sort of internal logic in the movie. As long as you can justify something within a film, nothing is ever too outrageous.
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