Undertow (2004)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

A Brilliant Conflict

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Two young boys run away from home because of reasons. One of them is mildly intelligent; the other has something very wrong with his brain. We know this because he's always eating random stuff and vomiting his guts out. Throughout the course of the movie he eats: insects, mud, paint, a bunch of other stuff I can't remember. None of this is ever explained.As tensions between the brothers become unbearable, the film staggers towards its outlandishly unrealistic and excruciatingly dull final scene. I got less than I bargained for, which is pretty impressive considering how far my expectations had fallen by this point.I rate Undertow at 9.99 on the Haglee Scale, which works out as an vomitous 3/10 on IMDb.

This movie would not end. It just kept going on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. I began to wish that my house would catch fire so I would have an excuse to stop watching it.This interminable tale starts out with John Munn (Dermot Mulroney) and his two sons. Chris (Jaime Bell) is a teenage delinquent with a crush on a neighbor girl. Tim (Devon Alan) is the brainy kid brother with a 1970s era Bee Gees haircut who makes himself sick by eating any appalling garbage he can get his hands on. They live out in the sticks and don't interact much with the rest of the world. Then John's brother Deel (Josh Lucas) shows up. Deel has gotten out of prison and is looking for work. John asks him to stay and help look after his boys. Deel agrees, but the reason he's really there is to find the old coins their father had. He finds the coins, things go terribly wrong and the rest of the movie involves Chris, Tim and Deel wandering aimlessly and pointlessly through the countryside in one of the most boring stretches of film I've ever seen or even imagined.There are so many scenes in Undertow that are so dumb and so purposeless they could only exist to stretch this story out to legitimate movie-length. We get to watch John Munn eat cake! We get to see him smoke a pipe! We get to listen to Tim prattle on about chiggers! We observe Chris and Tim performing chores for a black couple! And we also get to experience the slowest speed chase in the history of anyone chasing anybody! I am not exaggerating when I say that 90% of the second half of this film is useless crud. It serves no function within the story and it has no greater thematic or emotional significance for the audience.Compounding the awesome lack of meaning and direction in this story is that these characters talk about their emotions like they're guests on the Dr. Phil show. These people are portrayed as unsophisticated country folk, yet they speak as though they've been in therapy since they were born. There is nothing in this story that is left under the surface. Every last, little, possible nuance or subtlety is just splayed out in front of the audience, as though the filmmakers were worried that this film might be a bit too smart for people. It ain't.Josh Lucas is the only actor who manages to give an even halfway decent performance, and he's stuck with a character who stops making sense halfway through the film. Mulroney and his two young co-stars are just stiffs. Though to be fair, it's not like the story is asking them for more and they fail to deliver. The characters are just blocks of wood, so I suppose their uninspired work may have been a case of good acting in crappy roles.Finally, there's a lot of inexplicably arty direction going on here. Something will happen and that image will be repeated again and again. The film will flash to negative for a second or the image will freeze while we still hear people talking. Slow motion is used, not for some important moment in the story, but for a homeless chick walking. That's all she was doing. Walking. And they put her in slow-mo! None of these fancy tricks mean anything to the story or to how the audience is supposed to perceive it. I think the director simply thought they looked really cool. He was wrong.Undertow starts out like it's a "family coming together" movie, runs into a big moment of melodrama and then mutates into this ponderous, tiring, idiotic drool. I can understand why someone may have thought the first half of this film was worth making. I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what went wrong with the second half.

David Gordon Green explores the story in Undertow with an intention to tell the story, but there's also an intention to explore the spaces his actors inhabit, or run to, or from, and occasionally with the lyricism of a grungy street poet. This isn't to say the film is pretentious; it can be enjoyed by those who just want a good, harrowing chase movie. Yet it asks a little more for an audience complacent with the norm in Hollywood, used to the conflict being simplistic with respect to the characterizations. Its presentation calls attention to a director attempting to find the thematic beats through what could otherwise be a conventional ride. It's also no mistake to make the connection to films of the 70s, or specifically Terence Malick's austere visual approach; Malick is credited as producer, so it's bound to have some informal mark of his own somewhere.It's really a tragedy of the rural family, where a single father (Mulroney) raising two kids (Bell and Alan), the older one something of a troublemaker, constantly brought in to the cops. When the father's brother (a perfect antagonist in Lucas) gets out of prison and comes to visit, it's more than a friendly family call; greed and vengeance bring him there, and a horrible incident occurs that sends the two children running away, now with their uncle in tow. He's after some valuable old gold coins- family heirlooms or sacred Mexican lot, depending on what story is to be believed- and nothing will stop him. Meanwhile, the two kids (the younger of the two pretty sick most often) are left to their own devices, looking for work, hiding in junkyards, or with the help of fellow underworld travelers.Aside from that, which is the basic plot, a lot of Undertow sways between tense and taut drama and action, with a couple of really visceral fights and bits of violence, and an understated character study. There's the performances that feel right in the thick of it, with Bell giving it all in a breakout role. But it's just... hard to explain the sensibility that gives this an edge over other dramas out there. The setting is one thing, where for the most part (with a few exceptions) Green doesn't succumb to total clichés with these southern hobos and backwoods folk (or, at the least, there's a humanism caught by having what would appear to be non-actors in roles like convenience store clerks and tow-truck drivers). And also it's the cinematography, which is clear and cool and hand-held for some subjective impact, plus the eerie, unusual score by Philip Glass.All of these punctuations on a story that is dark and compelling are abound, but it's also this bond between the two brothers, and the memories that they share and how memories in general work into the narrative, that score Green success. It's about mood as much as plot, about sorrow and anger and fear and all these things, and it's never something to scoff as too artsy-fartsy. It's just about right.

Gold coins, betrayal, and murder figure in this story of two young brothers whose lives change forever when their father's brother unexpectedly shows up at their dreary farmhouse in rural Georgia. The older boy (Chris) is your typical rebellious teenager. But he protects and looks after his young brother (Tim), who has some kind of ailment that entices him to eat paint and dirt. Their father (John) is something of a morose deadbeat. Characters spend a lot of time brooding, especially in the first half. This slows the pace of the film way down.The visuals are very, very grungy, and none too flattering to backwoods Georgia. One sequence is set in a huge junkyard, with banjo music in the background. In this film you also get pigs and mud. The cost of production design must surely have been minimal. On the other hand, a lot of the story is set outdoors: a shipyard, a river, brushy thickets, a roofless building where street kids hang out.I'm not really sure what the point of this film was. Maybe it's the old idea that, under certain circumstances, children must fend for themselves when confronted with a crisis caused by greedy adults. In that regard, "Undertow" reminds me of "The Night Of The Hunter". But whereas the 1955 classic was dreamlike and poetic, "Undertow" stresses gritty realism.Acting and editing in "Undertow" are fine, as is the original score. Color cinematography is very good, although the use of freeze frames at odd times tends to be distracting. The film's ending is dramatic but rather ambiguous."Undertow" is a dark, brooding, and very slow-paced film with some good cinematography and acting. Because of its setting and its mood, it likely will appeal to viewers who enjoy Southern Gothic stories.