Deepwater (2005)

Lucas Black is a naive young man who is more or less forced by circumstances to repair and repaint a dilapidated rural motel owned by Peter Coyote. I doubt you've ever seen Coyote in a role like this -- totally weird, his voice lowered to a metallic rasp, his get-up -- the voice, the cigar, the hat, the white windbreaker with the rolled-back sleeves -- ripped off from Robert Mitchum's psychopathic heavy in the original "Cape Fear." Here's what I mean by "weird." Black and Coyote near the beginning are sitting in a café over breakfast, discussing the arrangement. Coyote conspicuously picks up the salt and the pepper shakers and gives each a quick wipe with his handkerchief. Black later tires to shake some salt on his meal, the top falls from the shaker, the meal is ruined. He makes an elliptical allusion to there being "still room for another body in that lake." Coyote laughs in the most unbuttoned way. "You and I are gonna get along fine!" They are? It reminded me of a ride I caught while hitch-hiking one night outside Las Vegas. The car was warm and comfortable, the family utterly bourgeois, a man, his wife, and a baby asleep in the back seat, until the driver turned to his wife and asked in dead earnest, "Where should we ditch this hot car, Honey?" It called for an immediate redefinition of the situation. Coyote makes frequent remarks that are as unnerving as that.There is quite a focus on cars, on what they look like, on the year and the make, and on how fast they go. The whole film carried with it a kind of rural Southern sensibility. The accent is Southern and so is the landscape. So is the dialog: "While you were out there pumpin' that car, your man here was carvin' on me like a big tom turkey." Mia Maestro as Iris, the maid who upkeeps the motel, is not Southern. She transcends regionality. Anything that so closely approaches a Platonic ideal can't carry with it any regional attributes. The role of course is beneath her but then everything is beneath her, a gilded Athena in a mossy Parthenon. Her voice is silky and sensual with Argentine overtones. Bezos a vos! You must see her in Carlos Saura's "Tango." The director has done his best and it's not bad. Some of the shots are conspicuously arty. He's avoided the modern tendency to wobble the camera and focus on irrelevant artifacts during a conversation. And when Lucas Black and Mia Maestro make love, he's also avoided the cliché of the strange hand and fingers caressing an unidentified but sinuous body part. However, there's only so much you can do to signal copulation without actually showing it, so we get two hands gripping a partner's hair. The scene proves that Black himself is no saint, since Maestro is Coyote's dissatisfied wife. Only towards the climax, when Black is training for a boxing match with Coyote -- the prize being Maestro -- is the stage of ejaculatory inevitability reached and we're handed a tasteless explosion of editorial razzle-dazzle.I suspect that the author of the novel, Matthew F. Jones, knows his way around manual labor because the film doesn't shy away from showing us Lucas Black scraping paint off the weathered boards of the motel. That willingness to show people at work is one of the things I admired about James Jones' novel, "From Here to Eternity." Val Lewton was careful to show us his principals at work too. And I admired the way that a truly sinister element creeps so gradually into the movie. We know Peter Coyote is weird, but it's only incrementally that we find out HOW weird. I'll end with the observation that one of the characters is a truly sick puppy but probably not the one you imagine.

Well there goes another hour and a half of my life that was totally wasted on a film that has ZERO substance, and a whole lot of nonsense. Characters appear out of nowhere with no development, not that you will care, because the entire purpose of this film seems to be setting up a ridiculous ending. All the characters are highly annoying and unlikable. I only watched this because of Michael Ironside, but the script is so disjointed, and his character so forgettable, he essentially has nothing to work with. Beware, this movie is a total waste of time, and not nearly as hip as it makes itself out to be. - MERK

With lack of funds and just released from hospital care, Nat Banyon(Lucas Black), leaves a bar fight via stolen car. Nat is heading to a job on an ostrich farm in Wyoming. He saves the life of Herman Finch(Peter Coyote), who owns a rundown motel in the tiny town of Deepwater. Finch actually seems to have the whole town cowing in fear of him. Finch offers to buy Nat a car in return for painting his motel. The young man is willing and even more so distracted by Finch's young wife Iris(Mia Maestro). The more time he spends in Deepwater, Nat realizes things may be shadier than they seem. What no one knows is the young drifter has a dangerous dark side. The cast also features: Michael Ironside, Lesley Ann Warren and Kirsten Bell. If the bartender looks familiar...he is Dee Snider of the hard rock band Twisted Sister.

brian aldiss once wrote that images from science fiction stories can stay with you for years. but that going back and re-reading the story will often lead to disappointment. this movie is not science fiction, but it will stay with you. and you don't have to watch it twice to be bored by it! what a twist!there are a number of movies like this. boring, but worth watching for images they leave with you. it's just a shame that they can't be enjoyed while viewing them.a better structured movie could also leave images with you AND entertain at the same time.but where does the blame lie? was the original novel at fault? or has the screenwriter done a bad thing?i for one can't be bothered to find out.