Not Coming to a Theater Near You
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
What do you think she meant when she said “a huge black monster with giant claws”?
NYFF COVERAGE – “Sometimes it’s the strange moments that stick with you,” observes the character John Munn in David Gordon Green’s new film, Undertow. This statement could be aptly applied to any of David Gordon Green’s three feature films, each of which meditates on the minute peculiarities of everyday life and speech in ways that heighten both the strangeness and familiarity of his characters’ interactions. But as many critics have noted, what is perhaps most strange about his films is not their sense of weird details, but rather the fact that Green’s ear for strangeness distinctly resembles that of another director: Terrence Malick.
Like Green’s previous films (George Washington, All the Real Girls), Undertow is set in the rural South, in the backwoods of Georgia, where John Munn has taken his two boys to live on a pig farm, away from people. His sons present quite a burden for the reclusive single father: the teenager Chris (played by a still agile Jamie Bell from Billy Elliott) likes to break windows and get arrested, and the sickly Tim can do no work on account of an obscure stomach disorder which he exacerbates by eating paint. When John’s brother Deel comes to visit after being released from prison, John takes him in to help with the boys (and the pigs). But it soon becomes clear that Deel has not come simply to help out.
The film’s setting and fragmented narrative style, combined with the intricate family mythology and occasional reference to classical Greece, situate Undertow in a Southern Gothic tradition. The film announces itself (both stylistically and via the press-packet) as a descendent of Faulkner, with its random flashes of violence, repressed family secrets, and the offhand lyricism in the dialogue. (Green seems to match Faulkner’s linguistic pyrotechnics with an arsenal of camera tricks — freeze frames, zooms, wipes, solarization — that plays with narrative time and echoes the cinematic style of the 1970s, the era in which the film takes place). But this is merely one of the stylistic influences that the film wears on its sleeve. The film’s second half is an explicit retelling of the chase sequence from Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, complete with its mildly comical tone and odd lack of suspense and urgency. And then there’s the enduring presence of Malick, evident in an almost direct quotation of Badlands’ forest scene, down to a Carl Orff-like score from Philip Glass.
Undertow will do nothing to dispel the Malick comparisons persistent in critiques of Green’s work, particularly as Malick co-produced the film along with Badlands producer, Ed Pressman. Indeed, if anything, it will likely polarize his critics further, causing some to recoil at his welcoming of influences, and others to be thankful for more “Malick-lite” in lieu of a new film from the reclusive director. But Green must be credited with some stylistic strengths of his own, particularly his warm facility with his actors and his desire to elicit sympathetic (if stylized) performances from them. This is a quality that Green’s cinematic forefather has largely disdained, but one that grounds the younger director’s work and makes Undertow an ultimately winning film.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: 35mm print
02 Oct 2004 2:37 PM | Comments (1)
tim doesn’t have a “stomach disorder.” he has pica. a disorder, possibly caused by mineral deficiency, where sufferers eat non-nutritive substances such as paint, soil, chalk, paper, etc.
eating paint and dirt is what causes tim’s stomach problems.
fairlane
27 September 2009
12:28 PM
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