The Deep End

Plot synopsis:
Margaret Hall (Swinton) and her family live a seemingly upper middle class life in Tahoe City, California. Her husband is a pilot on the aircraft carrier USS Constellation. She is startled to discover that her son Beau (Tucker), a high school senior, has been having a sexual affair with 30-year-old Reno, Nevada night club owner Darby Reese (Lucas). Margaret visits Reese's nightclub, The Deep End, to demand that he stay away from her son. That night, Reese secretly visits Beau and the two meet in the boathouse. Beau confronts him about asking his mother for money. The two argue, eventually coming to blows. As Beau returns to the house, Reese leans on a railing, causing it to collapse, and falls into the water, impaling himself on an anchor.
The next morning, Margaret discovers Reese's body on the beach. Margaret removes the body and dumps it in a cove but it is soon discovered and the police investigate it as a homicide. Soon after, a man named Alek Spera (Visnjic) confronts Margaret with a tape of Darby and Beau having sex. Alek demands $50,000 in 24 hours or he will turn the tape over to the police, which would implicate Beau in Reese's "murder".
Margaret struggles unsuccessfully to get the money. Alek calls Margaret the next day and tells her that she needs to get only $25,000 but Alek's partner, Nagle is convinced she is lying about not being able to raise the money. Nagle corners and beats Margaret but Alek arrives and the two men scuffle, and Alek strangles Nagle. Margaret attempts to take responsibility for Nagle's death, but Alek takes the body away in Nagle's car. As Margaret and her son drive looking for Nagle's car, they see it overturned in a ditch. Margaret attempts to free Alek, who is critically injured. Alek pleads with her to leave before the police arrive. Margaret stays until Alek dies. Back at home, Margaret, in a state of distress, is comforted by Beau. The camera then pulls back, as the scene shifts to the exterior of the house, the audience hears another phone call coming in from the absent husband, which Beau's sister answers. The Halls' normal life resumes.

Tags: neo noir, murder, violence, flashback, melodrama, suspenseful

Review:
In the THE DEEP END, a modern retelling of Max Ophuls' 1946 thriller THE RECKLESS MOMENT, Margaret Hall is a mother of three willing to do whatever it takes to keep her family safe from the irrational forces that follow her teenage son home one night from a nightclub of ill repute.
Mr. Visnjic is credible though never quite menacing as a predator in awe of, and ultimately vulnerable to, his tender prey.Taken at this level THE DEEP END, luminously shot in the gambling resort of Lake Tahoe, is an eerie joy ride that leans heavily on coincidence to tangle then unknot its plot.
Her earlier films include ORLANDO, in which she explored androgyny and immortality, and FEMALE PERVERSIONS, a Freudian critique of the feminist myth of "having it all."  In THE DEEP END, Ms. Swinton's nuanced performance comments on  motherhood as a source of both power and vulnerability.
They defend motherhood in the abstract while remaining blind to a real mother's needs.Margaret Hall is Ms. Swinton's most reluctant feminist character to date, a woman whose maternal ferocity the family setting renders moot and who must ultimately rely on the kindness of strangers.
And in such cases, decisions made quickly in the shadows of the subjective are often revealed as unconscionable in the cold light of objectivity, a scenario examined by writers/directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, in their tension laced drama, `The Deep End,' starring Tilda Swinton.
Her seventeen-year-old son, Beau (Jonathan Tucker), an aspiring musician who hopes to garner a scholarship to study music at college, has become involved with a man, Darby Reese (Josh Lucas) who owns a bar, The Deep End; and once she is aware of it, it's a situation of no little concern for a mother.
McGehee and Siegel adapted their screenplay from the novel `The Blank Wall,' by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, and it's a taut thriller, to be sure; but it is so singular of purpose that it decidedly becomes more of a character study that focuses on Margaret, and the effects of that natural bond between mother and son that provides the catalyst for her motivation and the impetus of her actions.
And though MeGehee and Siegel maintain the tension of the situation throughout the film, it does wear a bit thin along the way, and at least one pivotal element of the plot is questionable, and strains the credibility of the overall story.
What really makes the film work, though, and what maintains interest, is the performance by Tilda Swinton as Margaret.
And it makes one aspect of the film seem a little too pat, as if the character is there merely as a means to an end, to help the story along and tidy up the resolution.
In a smaller, but pivotal role, Josh Lucas gives a good performance as Reese, creating a character that is repugnantly smarmy, a guy whose influence over one's son would be any mother's nightmare.
this film is ridiculous ~ and the main character (tilda swinton as margaret hall) is even more so.
she spends most of her time in the film begging someone for something ~ "pleeease, (fill in the blank)." she begs her father-in-law, both of her sons (several times), her daughters, alec (the goran visnjic character) ...
THE DEEP END is an original and suspenseful thriller, pitting a mother, played by Tilda Swinton, against a blackmailer, played by Goran Visnjic.
It worked for me for several reasons, not the least being the great performance by Tilda Swinton as Margaret, an upper-middle-class mother with an obsessive desire to protect her son.
Swinton projects the image of a woman who can handle any situation; blackmail, the revelation of her son's sexual orientation, the notion that her son may be a murderer, taking care of her aging father-in-law, and running the family are all in a day's work.
On a photographic level, this is one great movie.Writers/directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel found their inspiration for The Deep End from the little known 1940's novel The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding.
The Deep End examines a housewife named Margaret (Tilda Swinton) who protects her gay teenage son (Jonathan Tucker) by covering up the death of his lover (Josh Lucas).
The only people who will enjoy this movie are those who can derive sufficient pleasure from seeing beautiful shots of Lake Tahoe, and lingering shots of Tilda Swinton and Goran Visnjic.
I do have to give kudos to the cinematography, opening title sequence, and sound work, but the film was such a train wreck by the end with its horrendous script, acting and direction colliding, I found myself laughing harder than any comedy I've seen in recent memory.P.s.
The Deep End. The enchanting opening score and a dominant blue hue eases its way of a concealed familial drama with a murder case, a blackmail and an in-the-closet gay son.
Tilda Swinton is the ace here (vaguely has sustained her indie-queen ethereality into a more mainstream scope since then), magnifying every impression into an intact personification of a role model mother of three children, who struggles to cover a murder case which she thinks has executed by her elder gay son (which is barely the truth as audience has witnessed the entire occurrence), after that developing a mutual affinity with a young gay blackmailer, things start to become more engrossing.
Goran Visnjic is equally empathetic and even a tad overshadowing Ms. Swinton during the final confrontation (a poignant moment arrives when their lips are so close to each other near the end of the film).
From a woman who makes some pretty stupid decisions in her obsession to protect her son to her totally oblivious family to developing a crush on the man who is trying to blackmail her for 50,000 dollars, yes, this is the deep end of suspending disbelief in film.
Tilda Swinton stars in "The Deep End," a 2001 film also starring Goran Visnjic of 'ER' fame and Peter Donat.
It's a modern remake of Max Ofuhls "The Reckless Moment." Swinton plays Margaret Hall, a busy mother in charge of three children and her father-in-law (Donat) while her naval husband is away at sea.
But someone knows that Darby was there, and Margaret is visited by a blackmailer, Goran Visnjic, who represents himself and his partner, and he wants $50,000, or he will give a video of Beau having sex with Darby to the police.This is a story about unfinished thoughts, about a woman who does what she feels she has to without thinking it through.
The level I'll offer is that the Swinton character is forced by circumstances to live in the moment and just take care of things as they come up - be it blackmail, her father-in-law collapsing, finding a dead body.
Maybe you can tell me how I can try harder between driving to ballet and soccer practice, trying to reach my husband..." He eventually sees what her life is, and, as the crux of the film, the two form an important bond.Tilda Swinton gives a brilliant performance, an underplayed one, of a woman who internally is on the verge of a nervous breakdown but externally holds it together for her family.
Adapted from Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's novel "The Blank Wall", previously filmed in 1949 as "The Reckless Moment", "The Deep End" is a somber and stylish suspense-drama, but perhaps it was due to having two directors, Scott McGehee and David Siegel (also the co-adaptors of the screenplay), that the film feels overstuffed, unwieldy.
( MAJOR SPOILERS) Long winded story about blackmail and murder, or more accurate homicide, with a mother under pressure by two loan sharks who smelled blood in the water and came in for the kill to make a $50,000.00 pay-day off her misfortune.Going to the Deep End night club Margaret Hall, Tilda Swinton, tells the club owner Darby Reese, Josh Lucas, to stay away from her son Beau, Jonathan Tucker.
You wonder what the police would do with the tape since there's nothing on it besides the embarrassing fact that Beau is in bed having sex with another man and is obviously gay.Alek later gets a change of heart when he arrives for the money and ends up saving Margaret's father-in-law's Jack Hall, Peter Donat, life after he got a heart attack.
The acting was better then you would expect from the uneven plot and the breathtaking photography of Lake Tahoe and Reno made you forget just how bad a movie "Deep End" really was..
However news of Darby's death brings a visit from the mysterious Alek, who has a tape of Darby and Beau having sex and is happy to mail it to the police unless Margaret can raise $50,000 for him.Although it looks professional and has a nice contrast between the middle-America home life of Margaret and the darkness that she tries to protect her family from, it must be said that it is a rather plodding drama at times and doesn't convince as often as it should.
It still produces enough of a plot to keep things moving but I couldn't help feel that the unconvincing delivery does much to take away from the potential in the concept.I can see what drew Swinton to the character because it is a potentially interesting twist on a dedicated mother.
The supporting cast are OK in Lucas, Tucker, Donat and others but again the weakness is in their characters and not their performances.Overall then, this is an OK film that has enough plot to just about keep things moving forward but nowhere near enough in the way of depth and development.
Besides the beautiful, atmospheric cinematography, the fulcrum of "The Deep End "is the conflict and relationship between Tilda Swinton and "E.R." hunk Goran Visnjic (and I was surprised how few people in the audience recognized him to get an in joke about a doctor), such that he, surprisingly, is changed more than she.
The motivations for a housewife to do things she'd never conceive she'd be doing under unexpected pressures is developed more believably than in "Traffic" like a quote I once heard or read: "Having children is like watching your heart walking outside your body."The Nevada setting is reminiscent of a similar recent character study within a sort of a murder mystery, Sean Penn's "The Pledge."I'm not sure the ending is as satisfying as the build-up, but I am now concerned that if I ever have to suddenly to pay off a blackmailer all my assets are held jointly with my husband.
The younger son and daughter had their personality quirks, but Tilda Swinton's character ("Margaret Hall") treated them like nuisances she only thought about when it was time to drive them somewhere.
The filmmakers seemed to think that the audience would buy that an unspoken chemistry was taking over the characters, but I didn't.I think the film would have been much better if Hitchcock had directed it; the idea of a suburban mother suddenly getting involved in a world of crime is an interesting one.
Tilda Swinton plays the embryonic-looking soccer mom par excellence in this somewhat-but-not-wholly gripping story of blackmail, family, and middle-class lifestyle.I think the complaints about plot holes and inconsistencies are a bit exaggerated.
But the film WAS done in the US, and it would take a Hitchcock to make a great movie out of the story of the mother trying to cover for the alleged crime of her son.
In her 25th film, dating back from David Jarman's way left-field odyssey, 1984's CARAVAGGIO, Tilda Swinton hits overdrive, changing up with effortless syncromesh.Lonely, if only she had the time to realise, motherhood is indeed her calling...even in Lake Tahoe!
Arguably her best post feminist role since ORLANDO (we should be gracious and forgive the small aberration that was THE BEACH) Tilda Swinton makes for a fascinating study of a mother in chaos, at this time perhaps, interestingly comparable to her counterpart, Nicole Kidman in THE OTHERS.As for ER's wet-dream for girls Mr Goran Visnjic, well, THE DEEP END was just his 'summer job'...something to do between out-takes.
The film begins when Margret, the main character, comes into a sleazy bar to tell off a suspicious man called Darcy Reece (I think) to stay away from her son.
Unfortunately this includes covering up the death of son's gay lover and dealing with the ensuing web of events this act unleashes.There are some nice moments in the film, but I found Swinton's performance to be a bit too removed (not to mention unconvincingly American).
I groaned my way through this, and only stayed to the end out of sheer disbelief that a generally well-made (and even reasonably acted) film could have such a diabolically bad plot turns.
Scott McGehee and David Siegel's first film was the seriously weired 'Suture'; 'The Deep End' is a more conventional movie, the story of a woman who tries to cover up her son's involvement in a killing.
This film is valuable mostly for the performance of Tilda Swinton as Margaret Hall, a prototypical soccer mom at the head of a privileged, overachieving family who finds herself acting against reason and propriety in order to protect her son, whom she believes has committed murder.Margaret lives in Lake Tahoe (a sublime setting well-employed throughout to sustain the film's chilly, noir-ish tone) with her three children and her father-in-law, a retired naval officer, while her husband--also a naval officer--is away at sea.
The ultra-proper and ordered Margaret--very much the traditional stay-at-home mom and military wife--transforms into a desperate, feral creature who will do absolutely anything to protect her young.The plot turns out to be more predictable than one would hope for, but the superb performances (in addition to Swinton's, Jonathan Tucker is excellent as Beau, and Goran Visjnic is also persuasive and compelling) make this one worth a look.
The Deep End is a movie that is crying out to tell a dramatic, suspenseful story of family bond, but ends up watching a couple of Hitchcock films and calling itself an expert of the genre.5.5/10..
Tilda Swinton is motivated to make a good film but no one else seems to care.
I did not believe for a single minute that the Goran Visnjic character was anything more than a complete loser who loved casinos in the end although Tilda Swinton appears to think I'm wrong.
Full-time mother, Margaret Hall, finds herself disposing of a body and frantically trying to raise $50,000 in 24 hours to protect her son, Beau, whom she suspects not only of murder but also of hiding a homosexual relationship with the victim.
Tilda Swinton gives a superb performance of controlled panic and motherly angst, Goran Visnjic is perfectly ambiguous as the morally-fraught blackmailer, and Jonathan Tucker is hugely convincing as the son concealing his sexuality despite the awful tension his lie creates.
Tilda Swinton puts on an Oscar-caliber performance, but mydisbelief of the plot in "The Deep End" went beyond suspension toflat-out rejection.No one so seemingly grounded in a "normal" life could becomeSO STUPID so qucikly.To think a mother capable of raising a scholarship winning/waterpolo playing son and a ballet dancing/automobilefixing daughter would suddenly lose her grasp on reality isimpossible to believe.A nice turn by Goran Visnjic as the bad guy with the good heart..
Tilda Swinton did a stellar job conveying her character's fierce desire to protect her son and kept the somewhat far-fetched plot grounded.
Jonathan Tucker was wonderful in the film as well and portrayed his character in an understated and simple way and made us understand why his mother would go to the end of the line for him.
And Tilda Swinton is remarkably talented; for that we are lucky.CyCy. Tight, effective thriller film-making, with awesome performances.
The film stars Tilda Swinton as Margaret, a mother of 3 who discovers in the wake of her eldest son's (Jonathan Tucker) car crash, that he was at a club called the Deep End.
When Margaret discovers this, she dumps the body far from the home, but this starts her getting involved with a dastardly (or is he dastardly) figure (Goran Visjic) who wants a whole lot of money or he will disclose a tape to the cops of her son doing something, well, let's just say not hetero like.The film's plot is actually quite an original, with tight scenes going in the film consistantly and the actors delivering the punchy dialogue quite well.
The pic is a reminder of old Hitchcock movies and even film-noirs at points (the scene where Margaret dumps the body is a very nice touch) and in that region it's very close to must see.
Only sqaubbles that kept this movie from being a great thriller- in some crucial moments, the characters keep they're motives and thoughts to themselves when it would be better for the audience to know it so.
In "The Deep End" Tilda Swinton's maternal instincts may not be of the average variety, but she makes us believe that they are well within the character's realm.
Margaret is an extraordinary woman and Tilda Swinton wraps her in an ordinary guise to throw us off.The film is not about blackmail or murder, it's about the tenuous relationship between mother and child, and the need for delicacy in the face of corruption.
In "The Deep End," we the viewers get to know some information that the characters in the film do not know.
Having no idea of its content I was captivated the moment that Tilda Swinton confronts a man she believes is a bad influence on her son.
Skillful acting and direction help bolster an average story in "The Deep End."Tilda Swinton and Jonathan Tucker make a convincing mother/son pair involved in a stark murder and cover-up of the son's clandestine hustler-lover.
The Deep End is a well-acted, well-directed movie that held my interest throughout.
Excellent acting all around but Tilda Swinton definitely is the highlight of this film.