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THE DEEP END (Red, go off it)
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I can't pay off the blackmail, I've got pick up my daughter from ballet class, says navy-wife soccer-mom Margaret Hall (Tilda Swinton) in this romantic-suspense-thriller gone awry.
Seventeen-year-old pouty-lipped eldest son Beau (Jonathan Tucker) is at that tender age where he can play limpid trumpet yet drunkenly crash a car, a thirty-year-old sugar daddy by his side. When said ominous androgynous menace turns up dead at their waterfront dock, Margaret's child-protecting primal instincts manifest: she goes to great and careful lengths to dispose of the body and its accoutrements. Crisis over, she reverts to type, yet cannot confront her sullen-angelic son, preferring instead a secret martyrdom.
In this money-obsessed story, the plot is nonsensical, the dialog stilted. (TILDA SWINTON, he observes irrelevantly, is an anagram for NOW IN A STILT'D.) Extreme coincidences thwart Margaret's plans like events in a nightmare. Tilda Swinton (ORLANDO) is an intelligent reserved actress, but at some point thoughtful frightened expressions do not sustain across vast gulfs of improbability that draw her to tender CPR-administering blackmailing hunk Alek Spera (Goran Visnjis, fresh from ER and before that, WELCOME TO SARAJEVO).
For all its atmosphere and beautiful visuals (Lake Tahoe is breathtaking), this movie collapses in its unbelievability and clumsy dialog (the byplay between Alek and his partner echoes like a Mamet parody). The folks behind us were snorting or laughing at its emotional moments. "Three stinkers in a row," said one of them when the credits silently rolled. "I'm never going to another Tilda Swinton movie again."
Avoid going off the deep end.