Directed by David Gordon Green

It can't be easy for a film maker to bear the label ‘poetic auteur'. The devotees' expectations either soar impossibly high or wallow sycophantically, determined to love your new creation whatever, while the critics hover like expectant vultures ... pretentious, tedious, self-absorbed, they've been in for the kill on David Gordon Green's new film, given its UK premiere at the London Film Festival in October. Well, I have seen none of his previous films, and came to it with a relatively clean palate. So here goes.

Chris (Jamie Bell) and Tim (Devon Alan) are two young brothers living with their melancholy widowed father in a small run down hog farm in Georgia. It's white trash Southern Gothic, Faulkner country, Malick  badlands.  In fact Malick, the film's producer, was a frequent presence on set, and David Gordon Green's reverence for him is clear to see, the film echoing his mournful dreamy landscapes and doomed young lives. The arrival of their uncle Deel (Josh Lucas), fresh from gaol, precipitates violence which breaks up their home and sets them on the run.  Night Of The Hunter now springs to mind, but Lucas is no Robert Mitchum, and the sense of menace is never as strong as it should be to really involve us in the boys' fate.

The film is hauntingly beautiful with dreamlike locations, lingering freeze-frame final shots and imagery drawn from the bible and myth - brother fights brother, father son, feet are pierced with holes, a woman appears to walk on water, a cache of ancient gold coins have a meaning beyond their actual value. Green claims that this imagery is meant only as a starting point for the audience to make their own connections - a valid point but it does let him off the hook somewhat.  

Far from being an auteur in the dictatorial mode, Green used improvisation and serendipitous encounters to flavour and sometimes change the direction of scenes, and one can feel the powerful locations taking over at times. But it is not without humour, often centring on the relationship between the two young brothers. Jamie Bell makes a good enough fist of the older troubled Chris, a million miles away from Billy Elliot country, accent and all, but the young Devon Alan is the more striking as disturbed but sensible Tim, with a penchant for hats and an eating disorder which leads him to scoop up rust and paint fresh from the tin (it's for the mineral content, the director informed us afterwards - and there I thought he had a death wish - that's what happens when you leave the audience to form their own conclusions of the imagery, Mr Green...)

It's sad that the film never really grabbed me. After the cataclysmic events on the farm, which were dashingly handled, I felt little concern or involvement in their plight, it was as if I were looking at a series of beautiful images, typified maybe by the mesmeric but monotonous Philip Glass score. But pretentious? I don't think so. No pretentious director would allow his ending to be so irreverently punctured - go and watch the film and you'll see what I mean...

London Film Festival, October 2004

www.mgm.com/ua/undertow