Has an American film renaissance started with David Gordon Green? Sure, there have been high-profile road signs in that direction over the past 10 years - Tarantino, Charlie Kaufman - but who but Green has shown such invention and versatility at such a young age? His "George Washington" and "All the Real Girls" were bellwethers. Now the 30-year-old has made "Undertow," a gothic Southern drama that shakes off the dead skin of current cinema.
The film is a tapestry. Two brothers live with their father in an old wooden house in the rural South. The father, John, is a quiet widower, the older brother a rebel, the younger a sickly but perceptive 10-year-old. John spends the day in town, working. The older brother, Greg, has had run-ins with the law and, in a ferocious opening sequence, is fleeing from a girlfriend's irate father. Their backwoods bubble bursts when Uncle Deel, John's estranged brother, pays them an unexpected visit. Bad blood begins to boil.
Though the exact time and place are not revealed (it was filmed near Savannah, Ga.), never has time and place been more defined and specific. Green has proven himself a master of creating authentic worlds around which his camera revolves. For "Undertow," he creates a texture and dynamic between characters and their environment that is hyper-real. His camera is entrenched in the lives of the four men and the hothouse Southern setting that is their prison.
How does Green balance all these tones? The opening credits sequence has the fury and kitsch of a 1970s blaxploitation movie mixed with "The French Connection," with a churning Philip Glass score italicizing it. Then there are moments of quiet, underhanded drama that seem to chant, "Faulkner, Faulkner." About a third of the way into the movie, when the confrontation with Uncle Deel reaches its climax, the film is an out-and-out thriller in the gritty style of "Blood Simple." As soon as the story settles into a chase narrative about the loss of innocence, "Undertow" burns with the distant ache of the best French films of the New Wave.
And the fulcrum of the story, Greg, is like a new Antoine Doinel. Jamie Bell, the lightfooted Brit from "Billy Elliot," gilds his resum? with a nuanced, hard-nosed portrayal of Greg. And Dermot Mulroney, who consistently makes stellar choices in projects ("About Schmidt," "Lovely and Amazing"), personifies grief and regret without ever making a show of it. Josh Lucas, as the wolf-like Uncle Deel, wrestles with a role that in the hands of any other director might have been career suicide. Here, he make his character's villainy mythical.
But what is the payoff? For all the suspense and drama of a family spinning wildly apart, the end sequence of "Undertow" - where a generation gap is violently bridged - is frustrating simply because it does not sate. We're used to movies that come gift-wrapped, with a red bow and a present inside. "Undertow" is expertly gift-wrapped, but inside is another box, and another.
On a first, unprepared viewing, "Undertow" feels like a seminal work. The film rings with authenticity and invention, yet does not forsake quick zooms, stylized music and other technicalities. It is almost like "Undertow" speaks a new and different cinematic language, while the dregs at the multiplexes continue their expensive pig Latin. We may not fully understand this language yet, but with Green as our tutor, we're beginning to master the basics.
