People are voting emotionally.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Tilda is superb as always and the one real reason to see this. She colors the space around her with profound tensions. She's like Brando, able to improvise a whole sea of shifting emotions in the space between the outskirts of her character and innermost soul, but whereas Brando struts in that space in capricious absent-mindedness, she surfs on what flows from inside her, letting float inside but balancing on the out.The film needed this same ability to color narrative space.It needed for us to not be in full control of the facts and stumble through what floats inside to color the out. It would have benefited from threading early for example the son's suspicion that she might be having an affair while their father is out at sea instead of inserting it late in the story when we know she's not. It needed for her relationship with the mob guy to be ambiguously defined from afar. It teeters in silly sentimentality shown as it is.Check out Bastards (the Claire Denis film). It's also about a mother being profoundly torn by what she believes she couldn't prevent, also noir about reality becoming cursed and devious because she couldn't face it clearly. But it takes place in that space between eye and inmost soul that Tilda anxiously inhabits here (and gives us the most advanced logic of perception since Lynch). This one just embeds her in a plot of to and from.Noir Meter: 2/4

The Deep End is a rare event: a touching thriller that is based more on relationships and personal growth than on plot, a film on a tight budget ($3 million) that is completely captivating, a remake of a film (The Reckless Moment (1949)) that really works. Many critics gave the film a top rating, and a few did not like it much, but most agreed that Tilda Swinton was superb. My own opinion is that everything works: the superb acting, the suspense, the finely detailed direction, the beautiful cinematography, the masterful screenplay, everything, even the melodramatic parts. Margaret Hamilton (Tilda Swinton), is an average, ordinary-looking, middle-class housewife, whose husband is away with the military. Her family is her life. She has reason to believe that her son (Jonathan Tucker) has killed someone and she disposes of the body to protect him.It only makes things worse by leading to blackmail. The handsome blackmailer (Goran Visnjic) gets caught up in a family emergency and becomes fascinated by and drawn into the close family setting. He is also attracted to Margaret. The film is mainly about her relationships with her son and with the blackmailer; one can connect emotionally with each of them and their own personal predicaments. The other family relationships are incidental but they do illustrate how her life is completely filled with the needs of others; there is not much time left for her needs. The DVD allows one to watch much of the film a second time, with the two directors (Scott McGehee and David Siegel) discussing the details behind the making of each scene, often showing several radically different takes of the same scene and explaining why they chose the one that they did. It gives a deep insight into the filmmaking process.To watch the film, I recommend that you turn off the telephone and pick a time when there will be no interruptions so that you will be free to become deeply absorbed in a very moving experience.

"The Deep End" premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival and was a breakthrough role for actress Tilda Swinton. She plays Margaret a fiercely protective mother of three who starts to lose her grip when her gay teen son is caught up in the murder of a night club owner.The story takes place in Tahoe where Margaret is basically a single mother, since her husband works on aircraft carrier in the Atlantic. Beau is her oldest at 17 and has been seeing the much older night club owner Darby. She confront Darby about their relationship at his club called the Deep End and tells him to stay away from Beau and offers him money.Beau looks to be a good kid who always seems to be getting into trouble and making the wrong decisions. He is a boy with an absent father and looks up to sleazy Darby. One night he comes over to visit and they start to argue over his mothers visit and her offer. A fight breaks out and things get out of hand. Early the next morning Margaret finds Darby's dead body washed up on shore with a boat anchor lodged in his chest. She furiously runs around hiding the body and the evidence fearing her son killed him.The next day a man appears at her door, its not the police but it's just as bad. Alek Spera (played by Goran Visnjic, who was on the show ER at the time) and his business partner are con men looking to black mail her with a video tape of Darby and Beau having sex. He wants $50,000 in 24 hours or he sends the tape to the police. Although she tries she can't come up with the cash. The next day when Alek comes to collect Margaret's live in father-in-law had just had a heart attack that moment. He helps give CPR and eventually saves his life. This starts off a very strange and interesting relationship between Alek and Margaret. Alek is the stereotypical con man with a heart of gold. He feels for Margaret's situation and tries to persuade his partner to call of the black mailing. This doesn't fly.This movie is all about Swinton's performance as a mother who will stop at nothing to protect her son, but also showing how lonely and vulnerable she is with her husband gone for long stretches of time. Her strength and determination to protect her family and the lengths she is willing to go are remarkable even though she is not sure of her sons innocence. All while taking care of everyone else and not letting on that something is seriously up. This is a great character study and Tilda is amazing! So check it Out!

Once I had finished watching "The Deep End" I had to look at the Netflix packaging to find out what year it was made because I couldn't believe that in the year 2001 an entire suspense melodrama could be mounted on the lone homophobic premise, "Dad Can't Find Out!"This tale of a Mad-Mom (as in insane) who goes to great lengths to prevent the world from finding out that *gasp* her 17 year-old son is gay (she can't even say the word!) is like a perverse remake of the 1950's Loretta Young feature "Cause for Alarm!" in which an average housewife does numerous stupid things trying to conceal a death she had nothing to do with.Here the wonderful Tilda Swinton (a good deal less wonderful here) plays a mom whose protectiveness of her near-adult son borders on the psychotic. Indeed, as the film progressed and she acted wackier and wackier, I was sure that it would come out that she is unwholesomely possessive of her son. Sonny boy (sullen and closed-mouthed) is carrying on with a much older man and mom interferes in a way that even a 13 year old would find mortifying, much less a 17 year old. She operates under the assumption that her gay son has been seduced and lured into contact with this man, but from what we see, he is just a young man who has fallen in with a bad crowd and is drawn to an older guy. A creepy guy albeit, but when we later find out how absent the father is and would not understand his son's gayness no matter what, then subtext kicks in and you start to imagine that Sonny boy is drawn to bad boys and inappropriate partners for a reason. Mom, however is hearing none of this. Even when said son wrecks a car drunk driving with his lover, the mom convinces herself that it is the sole fault of the 30 year-old man, not her son who was actually behind the wheel. Her son seems troubled and she seems like a reactionary nut, but is this what the film focuses on? No. The film has the creepy older gay guy accidentally die on their property and mom spends the entire film covering it up because she thinks in some way her son is involved. Since this family is severely screwed up (to me, that is, the filmmakers seem to think this affluent family of non-communicative, isolated individuals is worth protecting from scary gamblin', screwin' and blackmailin' homosexuals) she never actually asks the son what happened, calls the police, or even wonders how she could think her son capable of murder. The son mourns his ex lover for about ten minutes and never loses much sleep over the possibility that he may have been the last one to see him alive. No, everything is a whirlwind of dance classes, music lessons, baseball games and laundry for this bunch. Who has time to talk?After a series of plot contrivances too ridiculous to recount (among them an empathetic blackmailer who doesn't have the heart for the job...oh yeah, there are lots of those around), an alarming amount of people pay with their lives for the sole purpose of keeping Sonny boy's big, dark secret from daddy and maintaining the privileged class status quo. Oh, brother! Much of the stupidity that preceded it would have been forgivable if at the end there was perhaps an awareness on the mother's part that the distasteful acts she engaged in were not equal to what she thought she was protecting: the problem was not that her son was gay, nor that he rebelliously got mixed up with a guy almost twice his age, the problem was that her son's father would not understand and that she raised her son in an environment where who he was was not as important as what he appeared to be to others. She was less concerned with his lying, underage drinking and hanging out with guys with possible mob ties than she was with his being gay and "outed." What are the biggest moral transgressions here?"The Deep End" is so woefully shallow and is content to sacrifice psychological depth for artificially earned suspense.I can't remember when I've been so put off by the unintended offensiveness of a film's premise. Loathed it.