Rediscover: Undertow (2004)
Dir: David Gordon Green
108 Minutes
Rediscover is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that have flown under the radar and now deserve a second look.
Linearity is overrated. It is a simplistic, daily planner method of putting things in some semblance of order in a world that is confusing, cacophonous and chaotic. Good for shopping lists, a bit misleading for history books, bad for art. David Gordon Green’s Undertow is too linear for its own good.
Undertow feels like someone took an interesting story and put it into the typical three-act structure — a puerile assembly line method of screenwriting. It starts at the beginning: Dermot Mulroney and his two sons live in a ramshackle house in rural God-knows-where. We get a sense of their daily life: the father and oldest son work the land while the youngest son plays with toys or eats paint and vomits. That’s Act One. Then Josh Lucas, Mulroney’s ex-con brother, comes in and turns everyone’s lives down in a series of events that results in Act Two: the two sons on the run from their evil uncle. In Act Three, well, you know there’s going to be a showdown.
That is fine, but the film spends 30 minutes making us think it’s a family drama about people on a farm until it suddenly becomes some hybrid of a chase movie and a squalid odyssey. Unlike genre-bending films like (just off the top of my head) Death Proof or Timecrimes, it doesn’t feel like Green is playing with genre or audience expectation. Rather, it feels like a meandering anecdote where the storyteller is describing why he went to the mall when he should be telling us how he got arrested there.
The problem with telling this story sequentially is that the “kids on the run” portion of the film is far more interesting (to both the eyes and the attention span) than the half-hour of set-up. The film should have started with the boys traversing the countryside and slowly informed us just why Josh Lucas is after them.
Green is otherwise a fantastic filmmaker. It has, as I’ve come to expect from his films, beautiful cinematography. There are moments in the film reminiscent of his two previous, George Washington (impoverished children) and All the Real Girls (this one even has a Zooey Deschanel lookalike as a love interest), that lead me to believe that Undertow is the third part of a trilogy of films depicting sadness and Southern squalor. All three seem equally timeless — there’s much to suggest that Undertow takes place in the 1970s, but it could just as easily be 2003. The best part is the vague, art movie ending that further demands that the film take a more unconventional approach to its timeline than it does.
If only Green spent some more time in the editing room.
by Danny Djeljosevic
