Writers:
Scott McGhee and David Siegel
Directors:
Scott McGhee and David Siegel
Feature
length: 101 minutes
Extras:
Feature Length Audio Commentary By Writers, Producers, and Directors Scott
McGhee and David Siegel, “The Anatomy Of A Scene” Sundance Channel
Featurette, Making Of Featurette, Still Photo Gallery, Theatrical Trailer, TV
Spot
Languages:
English Dolby Digital 5.1 and English and French Dolby Surround 2.0
Subtitles:
English Captions and Closed Captions and Spanish Subtitles
Packaging:
Amaray Keep Case
Chapter
Stops: 24
Sound:
Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound and Stereo Surround Sound
Year
of Theatrical Release: 2001/DVD Release: 2002
Theatrical
Distributor: Fox Searchlight Pictures
Home
Video Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment
MPAA
Rating: R
Reviewer:
Mark A. Rivera
Tilda
Swinton stars as the upscale wife of an older Navy Captain with three children
and a beautiful Lake Tahoe home. Her oldest son is an aspiring musician applying
to Wesleyan and has been having an affair with an older guy. When she discovers
the identity of her son’s lover her reaction is not one of oh my God, or why?
She loves her son unconditionally, but she disapproves of the man he is seeing
and so she goes to the club where he works, “The Deep End,” and tells him
point blank “Stop seeing my son!”
That
night his son’s lover shows up at the house and has a confrontation with him.
The next morning she notices that her son’s face appears bruised and to her
horror she discovers the body of his lover near the lake and thinking her son
killed him, she takes the body out into the middle of the lake and dumps the
body.
The
next day when the body is discovered near her property, a man shows up with a
videotape of her son having sex with his lover and asks for fifty thousand
dollars in cash or the tape will be at the police and local newspapers in
twenty-four hours. Things grow even more complicated when circumstances draw her
and her blackmailer together leading to acts of desperation and plot twists.
Scott
McGhee and David Siegel wrote, produced, and directed this film, which was an
official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and offers a surprisingly well
thought out thriller that stays away from the clichés often prevalent in the
genre and particularly the contrivances of television soap operas. For instance
the events that draw the blackmailer and the protective mother are not
contrived, but rather happenstance and though I will never know personally what
it feels like to be a mother, one can understand the level any mother may be
willing to go to in order to protect her son. The other element that I thought
was refreshing about this movie was that the few gay characters, particularly
her son and her lover, are not put into some moral context where we see someone
portrayed as being as being overtly good or bad. Everyone is pretty much a
regular flawed human being. Not unusually angelic or hateful.
Twentieth
Century Fox Home Entertainment presents “The Deep End” on DVD with a very
good anamorphic (2.35:1) widescreen transfer with very good color saturation and
nice deep blacks. The transfer has a few scenes with some noticeable grain in
the background, but for the most part the transfer retains a sharp film like
quality. A well-rounded English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Soundtrack is
included along with English and French Language Dolby Surround 2.0 Soundtrack
options coupled with English Captions and Closed Captions and Spanish Language
Subtitles. The DVD also features a screen specific feature length audio
commentary track with filmmakers Scott McGhee and David Siegel.
Among
the extra features is the “Anatomy of a Scene” Sundance Channel special that
focuses on the initial blackmailing sequence between Tilda Swinton and Goran
Visnjic. There are filmmaker and cast interviews as well as storyboards for the
scene in the featurette, which has a running time of 24-minutes. There is also a
short promotional featurette that run a little over 2 ½-minutes as well as a
still gallery of color and black and white production photos.
The theatrical trailer and a TV spot and trailers for other films
available on DVD from Fox that include “Sexy Beat,” “Boys Don’t Cry,”
“Stealing Beauty,” and “Quills” wrap up the extra features included on
this DVD.
The
main menu features some subdued animation while the subsequent menus are
standard interactive still frames that are easy to navigate. “The Deep End”
will debut on DVD-Video from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment in mid
April of 2002.
©
Copyright 2002 By Mark A. Rivera
All Rights Reserved.