The Deep End
The Deep End
R | 21 January 2001 (USA)
The Deep End Trailers

With her husband Jack perpetually away at work, Margaret Hall raises her children virtually alone. Her teenage son is testing the waters of the adult world, and early one morning she wakes to find the dead body of his gay lover on the beach of their rural lakeside home. What would you do? What is rational and what do you do to protect your child? How far do you go and when do you stop?

Reviews
Hellen

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

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Mehdi Hoffman

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

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Matylda Swan

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

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Rosie Searle

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

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chaos-rampant

Tilda is superb as always and the one real reason to see this. She colors the space around her with profound tensions. She's like Brando, able to improvise a whole sea of shifting emotions in the space between the outskirts of her character and innermost soul, but whereas Brando struts in that space in capricious absent-mindedness, she surfs on what flows from inside her, letting float inside but balancing on the out.The film needed this same ability to color narrative space.It needed for us to not be in full control of the facts and stumble through what floats inside to color the out. It would have benefited from threading early for example the son's suspicion that she might be having an affair while their father is out at sea instead of inserting it late in the story when we know she's not. It needed for her relationship with the mob guy to be ambiguously defined from afar. It teeters in silly sentimentality shown as it is.Check out Bastards (the Claire Denis film). It's also about a mother being profoundly torn by what she believes she couldn't prevent, also noir about reality becoming cursed and devious because she couldn't face it clearly. But it takes place in that space between eye and inmost soul that Tilda anxiously inhabits here (and gives us the most advanced logic of perception since Lynch). This one just embeds her in a plot of to and from.Noir Meter: 2/4

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Kenneth Anderson

Once I had finished watching "The Deep End" I had to look at the Netflix packaging to find out what year it was made because I couldn't believe that in the year 2001 an entire suspense melodrama could be mounted on the lone homophobic premise, "Dad Can't Find Out!"This tale of a Mad-Mom (as in insane) who goes to great lengths to prevent the world from finding out that *gasp* her 17 year-old son is gay (she can't even say the word!) is like a perverse remake of the 1950's Loretta Young feature "Cause for Alarm!" in which an average housewife does numerous stupid things trying to conceal a death she had nothing to do with.Here the wonderful Tilda Swinton (a good deal less wonderful here) plays a mom whose protectiveness of her near-adult son borders on the psychotic. Indeed, as the film progressed and she acted wackier and wackier, I was sure that it would come out that she is unwholesomely possessive of her son. Sonny boy (sullen and closed-mouthed) is carrying on with a much older man and mom interferes in a way that even a 13 year old would find mortifying, much less a 17 year old. She operates under the assumption that her gay son has been seduced and lured into contact with this man, but from what we see, he is just a young man who has fallen in with a bad crowd and is drawn to an older guy. A creepy guy albeit, but when we later find out how absent the father is and would not understand his son's gayness no matter what, then subtext kicks in and you start to imagine that Sonny boy is drawn to bad boys and inappropriate partners for a reason. Mom, however is hearing none of this. Even when said son wrecks a car drunk driving with his lover, the mom convinces herself that it is the sole fault of the 30 year-old man, not her son who was actually behind the wheel. Her son seems troubled and she seems like a reactionary nut, but is this what the film focuses on? No. The film has the creepy older gay guy accidentally die on their property and mom spends the entire film covering it up because she thinks in some way her son is involved. Since this family is severely screwed up (to me, that is, the filmmakers seem to think this affluent family of non-communicative, isolated individuals is worth protecting from scary gamblin', screwin' and blackmailin' homosexuals) she never actually asks the son what happened, calls the police, or even wonders how she could think her son capable of murder. The son mourns his ex lover for about ten minutes and never loses much sleep over the possibility that he may have been the last one to see him alive. No, everything is a whirlwind of dance classes, music lessons, baseball games and laundry for this bunch. Who has time to talk?After a series of plot contrivances too ridiculous to recount (among them an empathetic blackmailer who doesn't have the heart for the job...oh yeah, there are lots of those around), an alarming amount of people pay with their lives for the sole purpose of keeping Sonny boy's big, dark secret from daddy and maintaining the privileged class status quo. Oh, brother! Much of the stupidity that preceded it would have been forgivable if at the end there was perhaps an awareness on the mother's part that the distasteful acts she engaged in were not equal to what she thought she was protecting: the problem was not that her son was gay, nor that he rebelliously got mixed up with a guy almost twice his age, the problem was that her son's father would not understand and that she raised her son in an environment where who he was was not as important as what he appeared to be to others. She was less concerned with his lying, underage drinking and hanging out with guys with possible mob ties than she was with his being gay and "outed." What are the biggest moral transgressions here?"The Deep End" is so woefully shallow and is content to sacrifice psychological depth for artificially earned suspense.I can't remember when I've been so put off by the unintended offensiveness of a film's premise. Loathed it.

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robert-temple-1

Tilda Swinton! What a gal! This harrowing and brilliantly filmed tale is a complete tour de force from beginning to end. Why is it that these modest independent films are always ignored for American awards? Swinton's performance is really Oscar material, and so are the writing and direction by the pair Scott McGehee (spelling that surname requires some practice!) and David Siegel. The film is based on a novel by Elizabeth Holding, and whoever chose that as the basis for a movie was very clever. The young Croatian actor Voran Visnjic (pronouncing that is even harder than spelling McGehee, but is apparently 'vish-nyich') was a brilliant choice for the other lead role in this film. The third role is Swinton's gay son, played sensitively and just right by Jonathan Tucker. Rarely has female multi-tasking been better portrayed than in this film, as Swinton carries out a multitude of household chores simultaneously with phone conversations, ironing separate piles of clothes and delivering them to their respective rooms, giving instructions to her children, negotiating her way out of blackmail which threatens to ruin her family, raising money while her husband is away on a battleship in the North Atlantic (he is an absent naval captain), plotting how to save her son from a murder rap, looking after her resident father-in-law, saving him from a heart attack, emptying the garbage, and much else besides. Swinton manages to make herself as unglamourous as possible, in order to simulate a 'normal American wife'. Of course there is no denying that she is one the strangest looking people on earth, a kind of alien in our midst. In certain shots, with the sunlight at a particular angle, the eerie green of her eyes shimmers like something from a sci fi film. Her very weirdness compels our attention, as we see this bizarre creature that she is enacting human roles, as if she were not really from outer space after all, but were 'one of us'. (I say 'us' for all those who really are from this planet.) Her genius is not just acting talent, it is the capacity to cast a spell. So you see, she really is another species, because she bewitches the viewer with some kind of extra-terrestrial magic, so that you become so absorbed you forget where you are. You could almost believe it is a Martian movie and you are on Mars watching it. That would fit. But then 'bang!' you are back to Reno, Nevada, which is all too earthly! There are lots of shots of the beautiful Lake Tahoe, beside which Swinton lives. And into her life comes the young blackmailer from a world of vice played by 'vish-nyich'. He is incredibly sensitive in delineating a 'lost' young man who slowly gains some humanity and reforms his character right before our eyes, a truly magical instance of character transformation, and frankly one of the most extreme examples of 'screen character development' in a mere 96 minutes ever filmed. The fact that 'vish-nyich' makes this convincing is a tribute to his profound acting skills. He has that handsome weak face that reminds one of the young Alain Delon. His thin cheeks even wobble in the same way at moments of stress. He conveys without any dialogue to support it at all his entire life history, how he never had a family, never knew a loving and attentive mother, always had a hard time and decided to become hard in turn, and proves how shallow the roots of all this ruthlessness really are within him. This film is truly a profound one, a masterpiece of film-making by all concerned, and it is a tense nail-biting thriller which has you on the edge of your Martian couch.

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sklemow

Easily one of the most subversively homophobic films ever produced. Gay men are presented as sordid, lascivious predators who exclusively lurk in harshly-lit gay bars in the corrupt big city, coming into suburban areas to prey on vulnerable, sensitive adolescent boys. The idea that this "good kid" would allow himself to be filmed in the act of having sex is preposterous enough, but the director really exploits the scene by showing the actual act with inter-cuts to Tilda Swinton's face looking repulsed and grief-stricken.What's even more dangerous about this film is the fact that it is full of Trojan horses: the indie feel of the production, the casting of Derek Jarman's muse Tilda Swinton (who should be inducted in a special hall of infamy for selecting this piece), and the fact that gay men were apparently involved in putting the film together.Perhaps the film has some artistic merits, but overall I found it an infuriating, irresponsible film that I would have preferred to miss.

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