FILM
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Sex scandal! Stoner mayhem!
Boarding school girls!
The Deep End excites; Kevin Smith aggravates;
Lost and D elirious disappoints BY C hristopher M c Q uain
T
he Deep End, a new film by the writing/pro-
ducing/directing team of Scott McGehee
and David Siegel, is a dark, taut thriller that
provides its thrills through carefully con
structed atmosphere, perfect pacing and wonder
fully unusual performances.
It’s also exemplary of an authentic strain of
progressiveness making its way into all genres of
cinema. Its gay characters and gay-themed sub
plot are not representative stick figures hut real
people whose flaws and virtues have little to do
with their sexual orientation.
Tilda Swinton (the reputable English actress
who starred in much of Derek Jarman’s great
queer cinema, Sally Potters Orlando and Tim
Roth’s The War Zone) stars as a housewife
named Margaret Hall, who lives with her father-
in-law and children on the California side of
Lake Tahoe. Her Navy captain husband is
almost always gone, leaving his family
ensconced in an expensive-looking, chilly cot
tage that has all the appeal of an Architectural
Digest spread.
Her eldest, Beau, is an almost-legal musical
prodigy, Ivy League college applicant and grow
ing worry. Margaret has had to rescue him from
a drunken driving accident in which a suspi
cious “friend” of his named Darby Reece, the
significantly older owner of a gay nightclub, was
the passenger. She suspects the two are more
than friends and heads to Reno to confront
Darby.
That night, he shows up at their home and
furtively meets with Beau in the boathouse,
where his reptilian nature is revealed when he
admits he was willing to accept money from
Margaret to stay away from Beau, who’s con
vinced Darby had real feelings for him. They
fight, and Beau flees the scene.
The next day, Margaret finds Darby’s body,
impaled on an anchor, washed up on the beach.
Margaret assumes Beau has killed the predatory
man and hides the body.
To make her had day worse, a blackmailer
(the excellent Goran Visnjic) shows up with a
videotape of Darby and Beau having sex. As
Margaret struggles to keep up her soccer-mom
household duties and come up with $50,000 to
keep the tape from being made public, the
blackmailer begins to seem more complex than
he appears. All the sublimely noirish goings-on
Without a travel agent,
you’re on your own. '
build to a devastating, quietly acute climax, one
of the most gratifying of any film I’ve seen this
year.
The Deep End has all the simultaneous sto
icism and tingly, creeping dread of a classic film
noir (it actually is based on the 1949 Max
Ophuls film The Reckless Moment). It’s also
gracefully, beautifully shot; the visual connota
Is Kevin Smith (left, with Jason Mewes)
tions in some scenes are so good, so revealing,
a
homophobe? Does it matter?
it’s actually startling.
Everything is exquisitely underplayed and
nod to the army of comic book geeks who wor
subtle. The performances, especially Swinton’s,
ship the director for the same reason we film
are rightfully austere and tight-lipped; as in a
nerds worship Martin Scorsese; he’s a fellow
David Mamet film, they’re crisply starched with geek who somehow made good.
out being stuffy or sterile.
To Smith’s credit, he makes some brave
The Deep End might not actually he great
attempts at self-parody and zestfully bites the
cinema— there are too many minor missteps for
hand that feeds him; Miramax, the distributor of
that—but it’s an unequivocally good film. Com Jay and Silent Bob, is made tidy satirical work of.
pare it to its immediate competition in the sus
The endless cameos by notables such as Carrie
pense-thriller and queer-indie suhgenres,
Fisher, Chris Rock, Gus Van Sant, Matt Damon
and Ben Affleck are actually funny.
though, and it might as well be Citizen Kane.
But most of the film is as belabored as a pant
ing dog, dismally struggling to be provocative,
ike much media watchdogging, the Gay and
Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s attack fresh, irreverent and snappy. It doesn’t work.
Instead, we’re treated to Smith’s tired Gen X
on filmmaker Kevin Smith for his latest
attempt at cinema, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, cultural references and conflicted, barely dis
guised adolescent sexual frustration. This means
is an unwarranted bit of wolf-crying, giving the
cultural product at its center far
too much credit (not to men
tion free publicity). The idea
that this movie contains any
thing significant or even tangi
ble enough to be considered
offensive will seem laughable
to anyone who actually sits
through it.
Ostensibly the tale of how
the two title characters make
their way to Hollywood to pre
vent a film based on characters
based on them from being
made, Jay and Silent Bob is little
more than a running series of
episodic sketches involving the
From left, Lea Pool directs Jessica Pare, Piper Perabo and Mischa
crude misadventures of the
Barton in Lost and Delirious
pothead losers, who in fact are
most of the humor is at the Beam and Butt-head
based on comic book characters created by Smith
level, significantly less charming in execution
(who plays Silent Bob). The characters have
than the notorious animated pair.
popped up briefly in other Smith movies—
The film’s ballyhrxved “homophobia” is just
Clerks as well as the surprisingly thoughtful and
the cliched, clearly wrongheaded and cmel yet
queer-positive Chasing Amy — apparently as a
L
Meet Someone Neat!
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C hristopher M c Q ua in is a Portland writer and
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•
•
A
couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of see
ing and raving about Set Me Free, a realist but
pretty kitchen-sink picture involving a
young French Canadian girl who falls in love
with a movie, eventually finding salvation
through filmmaking.
It was the work of Lea Pool, herself a Quebec
filmmaker. I hoped she could be added to my
(far too short) list of venerable modem women
filmmakers—Jane Campion, Mary Harron, Rose
Troche— who, even with their quirks and
imperfections taken into account, still can be
counted on to bring us postfeminist/progres-
sive/queer-positive films that are intriguing,
complex and alive.
How disappointing, then, that her latest, an
English-language bit of sogginess called Lost and
Delirious, is so thoroughly trite and corny, at
times even to the point of degrading the actors
and the audience. The plot— a naive small
town girl arrives at boarding school, where she
rooms with a secretly lesbian couple and
becomes entangled in the joys, disappointments
and ultimate tragedy of their love— isn’t a bad
idea.
The earless, greeting-card tone of Judith
Thompson’s script, however, certainly is. Our
heroine is meant to be a tragic martyr of homo
phobia and enforced normalcy, but any emotions
or ideas Thompson and Pool attempt to signify
are so generic and/or silly as to be laughable.
There are brief, fleeting glimpses of the
visual poetry Pool proficiently displayed in Set
Me Free, but Lost and Delirious is a misstep, a
wasted opportunity. It only can be hoped it
won’t jeopardize her future opportunities to
further the craft she already has proven herself
capable of. J D
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South Tacific
essentially meaningless paranoia of teen-age
straight boys whose (presumably hetero) sexuali
ty hasn’t yet matured into any semblance of
confidence or security. There is also, of course,
bathroom and genital humor aplenty, all done
with a smugness suggesting Smith labors under
the erroneous delusion that he’s a) original and
b) really sticking it to the strait-laced P.C.
Establishment with his pseudo-chauvinism and
cocksucking jokes.
All of which is fine when done right. It’s
hard not to laugh at the crude breeziness of such
dumb-duo comedies as Wayne’s World, Dick and
even Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion.
This film’s downfall is its joylessness. Smith
doesn’t seem to understand that mere vulgarity,
however harsh, is undermined by actual serious
ness. His film is self-conscious and self-
impressed— a lame, fatuous, terminally disingen
uous act of wannabe naughtiness.
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