Undertow

Released 2004
Stars Jamie Bell, Josh Lucas, Devon Alan, Dermot Mulroney
Directed by David Gordon Green

Over the course of just three feature films, writer-director David Gordon Green and cinematographer Tim Orr have created a cinematic world as instantly identifiable as David Lynch's or Federico Fellini's. It's a place in the American South where kids grow up as wild and free as weeds, uncorrupted by the emptiness of contemporary pop culture. Rust creeps across abandoned cars and junkyards seem to outnumber cell phones. Before Undertow, this world largely existed without villains. Green's third film technically qualifies as a thriller, but it's a thriller the same way Breathless is a crime film and The Long Goodbye is a detective movie. The director takes what he needs from the genre and discards the rest, never sacrificing his idiosyncratic personality.

Nursing a pipe and a bone-deep sense of loss, Dermot Mulroney stars as a stoic, decent widower who retreats to a life of farming and semi-seclusion with his two sons (Jamie Bell and Devon Alan) following their mother's death. Bell's wild streak worries Mulroney, especially after Mulroney's jailbird brother (Josh Lucas) descends upon their home with a glint of madness and vengeance in his eyes, nursing bitter grudges and eager to settle old scores. What follows feels as much like a road movie as a conventional thriller, with Bell and Alan taking off à la The Night Of The Hunter, with Lucas in unhurried pursuit.

Summary by Nathan Rabin

I enjoyed the languid pace of this movie. It's a little more mainstream than Green's previous two, but it still has his art film fingerprints all over it. It opens with the cringe-inducing scene when Chris jumps on the nail. This was brutal to watch, and it made me wish the movie was a little more grounded in reality. Chris had a large nail go through his entire foot and never went to the doctor. He was even slopping pigs barefoot the next day, and I felt such details fought with the reality of the story. I was also disappointed with the ambiguous ending, because I didn't think it fit the rest of the film. I suspected Chris might die at the end, but the way it was handled was emotionally flat. It was pretty obvious the hospital scene was a fantasy, but the fantasy robbed Chris' sacrifice of the emotion it deserved. The black and white shot of Chris wading into the waves could have worked, but the popping balloon jarred me out of the reverie. I thought it was an unsatisfying end to a good story, but it's worth seeing if you liked either of Green's first two movies, George Washington or All the Real Girls). --Bill Alward, November 3, 2005