![]() I wish I could be nearly as gung ho about the 5.1 Dolby Digital audio, especially considering the amount of TLC helmer David Gordon Green says went into the mix, but even at a few notches above reference level, Undertow sounds peculiarly mousy here. Compromised by a touch of filtering, the image is nonetheless tactile and blemish-free, with saturation, contrast, and shadow detail that are each best described as irreproachable. Originally published: October 22, 2004.īy Bill Chambers MGM has assembled a fine DVD package for Undertow, starting with a marvellous 1.82:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. ![]() (Green might be too good a director of actors: Bell's performance is so immediate that his Chris never quite transcends himself into a representative of the collective unconscious.) Undertow is good, but the perhaps unfair expectation based on just two pictures is that Green's films be sublime. It's a cunning mosaic of powerful images and ancient themes without gravity. There's magic in Undertow, not the least of which Green's devotion to pure cinema and the clarity of visual storytelling, but the picture fails to touch the archetypes that it uses to tell its tale. There's much made of smell and the importance of tactile information, how similar the feeling of muck and shit against bare skin is to eating a slice of chocolate cake with your hands. It's less troubadour ballad than epic poem in its essay of a boy who would be king finding his manhood in gouts of blood, backwoods stigmata, and baptisms in muddy streams. Heavy with superstition and regional flavour, Undertow works best as the shadowed underbelly of O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Undertow is a beautifully shot and structured film that isn't about anything greater than how this particular boy is a product of his savage environment. The moral isn't worth the telling, is what I'm saying. ( Undertow features the formerly scarce Glass's fourth score this year.) But with Green working almost entirely in allegory, with all of the gilded, laden symbols that that suggests, what is the signified aside from the hoary ideas of fathers and sons in uneasy orbit? There's no room for women in Undertow unless the feminine element is the ocean, its implacable pull underscored by the film's title-the girl in the beginning is rhymed with a girl at the end (Shiri Appleby): both are treacherous, the second resolving as the maiden to be championed by Chris's sullied knight. Green is making myth here more than he was in either the lyrical George Washington or the stunned, melancholic All the Real Girls the picture favours freeze-frames, sudden saturations of light, and the sort of mesmeric state implied, if not actually evoked, by Philip Glass music. There's a mention of River Styx ferryman Charon and a little something about a fortune in Mexican gold before a murder most biblical sets Chris and Tim on an O/odyssey across the bottomlands. ![]() ![]() The film's unnamed rural south is Green's Yoknapatawpha County, and Chris lives there on an isolated hog farm with his father (Dermot Mulroney), younger, paint-sipping brother Tim (Devon Allen), and, eventually, his uncle Deel (Josh Lucas). (Hints of an adolescent All the Real Girls.) Chris Munn (Jamie Bell) is the boy, gawky, dotted with acne, and so inarticulate when he's jilted by the girl (Kristen Stewart) that he expresses his hurt with a rock through a window and a long stare a chase ensues that ends with Chris getting a nail in his foot and taking a dip in a river. Undertow opens with a voiceover-accompanied image of a boy standing in the surf that segues into an awkward courtship between two gawky teens. ![]()
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