'Deep End' puts domestic twist on classic thriller

To anyone who has trouble envisioning a soccer mom as either the subject of a meaningful work of art or as the driving force of a compelling narrative: see The Deep End.

COURTESY FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES Yes, this woman is in fact wearing no underpants. Too bad she's your mom.

Admittedly, the plot structure gives this mom more material to work with than your run-of-the-mill housewife. Margaret Hall (Tilda Swinton, who played the title role in Sally Potter's 1993 Orlando) faces a situation more serious than grass-stained jeans, brush-burned knees, and temper tantrums. Initially, she plays the universal role of the protective parent, mistrusting her teenage son's unsavory older lover. The scenario takes a turn for the bizarre, however, when mere disapproval escalates into an emergency involving a pornographic videotape, blackmail, and multiple homicides.

Although such elements seem more fitting in the dark, claustrophobic world of film noir than on the sunny streets of suburbia, The Deep End transports them to idyllic Lake Tahoe, where they threaten a comfortable American family. By virtue of the jarring incongruity of setting and circumstance, The Deep End develops the intrigue of a tale in which ordinary people are in the midst of quite extraordinary events. Like many compelling thrillers, it fascinates us with its familiarity.

Danger initially appears onscreen in Darby Reese (Josh Lucas), a nightclub owner from Reno whose malevolent sexiness darkens the light-hearted blue hues of the film's early scenes. He has been secretly involved with Margaret's teenage son Beau (Jonathan Tucker). A drunk-driving accident blows their cover, and Margaret discovers their liaison. She warns Reese away from her son, but he refuses to abandon the relationship and violence erupts. When Margaret finds Reese's dead body on the lakeshore the next morning, her stable family life is suddenly plunged into an alternate world of dark deeds.

Margaret has to deal with the body, the crime scene, and an unexpected financial burden when an acquaintance of Reese's, Alek Spera (Goran Visnjic of ER), blackmails her for the $50,000 debt owed him by the dead man.

Margaret must get the money and make the payoff while maintaining a façade of normalcy, one that has prevented authorities from pointing the finger of blame at her and her son. Since Margaret's husband, a naval officer, is literally away at sea, the task falls to her alone. However, Alek soon swoops in to rescue his beleagured damsel, betraying his boss but following his heart.

The plot is pretty traditional, but the Western wilderness setting doesn't always jive with the more "urban" sequence of events; Reese's impossibly shiny Corvette seems like a token intended to unify the two. The tale doesn't feel quite contemporary, reflecting its '40s sources: the story "The Blank Wall" by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and the subsequent film adaptation, The Reckless Moment, directed by Max Ophüls. But the writers (Scott McGehee and David Siegel, who also co-directed) have smoothed over most possible anachronisms and inserted a few modernizations, most notably by changing the identity of Margaret's teenage child from a straight female to a gay male. And while Reese's homosexuality is one of many reasons Margaret finds him menacing, the film remains uncontroversially p.c.

The cast of The Deep End is excellent, hinging on Swinton's stellar performance. Although she looks more glamorous than the mother that most of us go home to, she gives a convincing performance as a parent who comes through in a pressure-filled situation to protect her children. Thin and unthreatening as she appears, she uses facial expressions and body language to convince us that she's capable of hefting a corpse and performing other feats of physical strength. In fact, her reserved speech and impassive expressions suggest that her pretty face conceals an inner strength that only requires crisis to surface.

Swinton's fine performance is complemented well by the exceptional photography and editing, which finally surpass the acting to steal the show. The emotional drama is crucial to the film, but the true triumph of The Deep End is that it doesn't force Swinton's perfectly controlled performance to bear more emotional weight than it can handle. As in many films, the visual world constructed within the rectangle of the movie screen—the solitude of a lake, the sadness of a hue, the tension of a series of cuts—can ultimately speak volumes to the actors' mere sound bites.

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