Shallow Water
Not yet 30 years old, Green is still finding himself. But supernovas like George Washington happen when novice filmmakers find the world. George Washington could affect such extravagantly poetic style (symbolic imagery and high-flown verbal narration) because it was also being real. Those impoverished black and white kids, hoping in a future that the Reagan revolution and Bush Sr.'s indifference had denied them, evoked a culture not much seen in American movies. Green's photographic testament to their lives had the surprise and virtue of discovery. Realism and poetry were sustained in exquisite balance. Green achieved the kind of movie Terrence Malick himself would not dare-George Washington was a naive yet unflinching look at the waste of America's youngest generation. This made up for Malick's sociological lapses, even in movies as fine as Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line. So it is a step backward that Green now seems to imitate Malick's poeticism so slavishly. Who knows if Green has another good film in him? It may be that George Washington, like Do the Right Thing for Spike Lee, was the movie he was put on Earth to make.
The insufficiency of Undertow became undeniable to me while watching Around the Bend. Writer-director Jordan Robert's debut feature displayed a genuine, realistic sensibility reminiscent of George Washington. Not a novelist, Roberts conceived his characters (a family-of-man dynasty played by grandfather Michael Caine, prodigal son Christopher Walken, confused young father Josh Lucas and his own preteen son, Jonah Bobo) visually, without the "literate" cool that spoils so many middle-class movie concepts. Roberts brazened a sensual appreciation for his characters as people: each one a warm personality and fascinating camera subject. Caine is a failed father; Walken his criminal, junkie son just out of jail, sorely aware that he's been a failure; and Lucas a young father of the next generation, trying to raise his own child despite harboring an overwhelming sense of bereavement.
I scoff at those reviewers who dismiss Around the Bend as cliché-ridden because they don't appreciate that the three lead actors (especially Walken, whose face has more lines than a road map) are so visually and emotionally spellbinding. Only a prig would ignore Roberts' on-the-road imagery, the orange-on-purple-on-black sunsets that evoke Gone with the Wind without William Cameron Menzies' artifice. The impact of Roberts' cast recalls that of the fresh, non-professional kids in George Washington. As Caine, Walken and Lucas reunite, these stoic, proud, hurt-hiding men remind themselves of their blood bond. In the film's elegiac plot, they become aware of their ashes-to-ashes commonality, symbolizing the family ties and human fate that most movies are too glib to admit.
But in Undertow, family is merely a conceit. Green's unoriginality-his pretense-impresses those people whose appreciation of movies disconnects from spiritual life. The bowdlerized Cain and Abel subplot in which the envious Uncle Deel kills his brother John (played by Dermot Mulroney) leads to young Chris and Tim's exodus, but it doesn't strike the same chords as Around the Bend (which is the most credible American father-and-son movie since De Niro's City by the Sea). Lacking George Washington's documentary veracity, Undertow asserts a fake Baptist contrivance.
As Green's father figures, Dermot Mulroney and Josh Lucas only make sense when they clash-a death-match that Green shoots as a mirror reflection. One brother kills the other in an image reflected in shards of glass-evidence of a broken world. This self-consciousness is worse than Roberts' unabashed sentiment. Undertow parades its deliberateness, yet Green never makes his story compelling. He resorts to hackneyed earnestness like Sean Penn's The Indian Runner (which borrowed its Cain-and-Abel story from Bruce Springsteen's song "Highway Patrolman"). Dressing it up in technical flash (color imagery that becomes b&w realism, speed-retarded imagery like Neil Jordan innovated in The Good Thief to critique a too-familiar genre) only calls attention to itself. The emotional effect is nil.
Green still qualifies as a regional filmmaker. But the region is his mind, not the South. His penchant for private poetry ("I might be too young for my head," "Can I carve my name in your face?") turns clichés into personal truth. But when spoken by recognizable actors, it loses the sense of validity that distinguished George Washington. It all seems arty. Jordan Roberts, however, does more, capturing pain in Josh Lucas' numbed blue eyes as he beholds Walken, his wreck of a father. We're allowed to see something extraordinary. It's a look of tender shock, because Lucas' character is always surprised by his own family history. But in Undertow, Josh Lucas once again is reduced to the predictable. Playing a role where his body is taut and his mind is coiled (as in Wonderland), he proves himself the best white-trash icon since Robert Mitchum. Green turns him into a monster, whereas Roberts brings out his modernity and naturalness.
Uncle Deel's stock villainy makes it clear that Undertow neglects the truth we expect of independent filmmaking. De Niro's bible-spouting Max Cady in Cape Fear made a more convincing combination of religious hysteria with social aggravation than Uncle Deel. Clearly, Green hasn't reached as deeply into his subconscious-or into his heart. He fails to unleash his imagination as fully as Laughton did in Night of the Hunter or as Francois Ozon did in his Hansel and Gretel fable, Criminal Lovers.
Poetic Symbolism means more to Green in Undertow than Truth. Bell physically resembles Green (so it's touching when he expresses loss-lad anxiety: "Dad would look me in the eye like he didn't know who I was, asking 'How'd this kid spring from me?'") But it's ludicrous when Green's protagonist accidentally impales his foot on a nail sticking out of a plank and instead of removing the nail, bends it-turning the injury into the cross he must bear. Even more ludicrous is the suggestion that Uncle Deel, the nemesis, is Chris' real father. Obviously, Green saw The Empire Strikes Back. Doesn't he know we did too?
A talent as precious as Green's deserves better counseling than he's received here, and in All the Real Girls. We don't need another self-absorbed indie. Undertow's view of wayward youth avoids approving youthful decadence like a Larry Clark movie (the street kids Chris and Tim meet are more like The Outsiders than Kids); still, the film's social observation is appalling. Brother Tim keeps tasting the world and throws up from it, and as a duo, he and Chris encounter a backwoods black couple (Eddie Rouse and Patrice Johnson) who temporarily offer them shelter, only to face Uncle Deel's enmity. This sequence recalls the climax of Clint Eastwood's A Perfect World (where racial difference threatens to become pure evil), and yet the conflict Green implies is horrendous. The childlike, innocent black couple is not angelic, they're just cannon fodder, introduced only to be destroyed.
Undertow lacks the conviction of both George Washington and Around the Bend. It's full of "poetic" effects-not true cinematic poetry. The homeless girl Chris and Tim meet doesn't represent a lost sense of identity like the crazed white girl in Beloved. And the scene where Uncle Deel tries drowning Chris hasn't the primal emotion of Abraham sacrificing his son in the Old Testament. Though all of that is implied, Undertow neglects the good sense in which the Around the Bend patriarch says, "Some of us are more broken than others. A family is supposed to carry each other." Instead, Green proffers ugly violence and bizarre sentimentality. It's a sorrowful refutation of the insight that made George Washington special.