View Trailer Here

Sounds like Ebert loved it as well at the Toronto Film Festival. I've really enjoyed Green's work so far, but his first 2 films he also had writing influence so it'll be interesting to see how he handles another's writing.

Ebert's Discussion of Undertow (and other notes from Toronto)

Up-and-comer tells tales of disaffected youth with grace

September 13, 2004

BY ROGER EBERT

TORONTO, Ont. -- This kid David Gordon Green is 29 years old, and he is a great filmmaker. He walked onto the stage at the Toronto Film Festival wearing jeans, a T-shirt and flip-flops, and said he'd gotten worked up over the premiere of his new film and stubbed his little toe on his coffee table and broken it. "It's twice the size it was an hour ago," he said morosely, peering down at the injured digit. And then he showed us "Undertow," and this film is a masterpiece.

Green has his own voice, his own tone, his own world. He tells stories of wandering and disaffected young people -- not rebels, not outcasts, just somehow lost -- who live in an American South of empty fields and marginal homes and rusted-out remnants of bankrupt manufacturing enterprises. They yearn to love and belong, spend moments of peace and gentleness, live in a world where terrible things can happen. He photographs them with the attention of an artist. He gives them things to say that you have never heard anyone say before, and yet it always sounds as if they would say them.

His first film, "George Washington," made in 2001, was an astonishing debut in which a young character dies and his death is concealed and no one is really to blame and a great sadness grows. Then at Sundance 2003 came "All the Real Girls" (2003), about a boy who has made meaningless love to many girls but now meets a girl he really loves, and hesitates to touch her because it would reduce her to being like all of the others. Those films had a distinctive, assured voice, unlike any I had heard before; they were unique in story and style while still somehow seeming familiar, as if their world was not new but simply forgotten.

Now here is "Undertow," about two boys being raised in a rural district by their father, who mourns the death of his wife. The older boy gets in trouble, runs a nail through his foot, loves his little brother. One day their father's brother turns up fresh from prison, and moves in. He is not a nice man. He wants the gold coins left by the boys' grandfather. His greed leads to death and danger, and an odyssey by the two boys across the worn-out local landscape. They meet homeless kids their age, get close to trouble but not in it, build a shelter in a junkyard. All the time the younger brother eats strange things and they make him sick.

I pause in frustration at such a bald plot outline. Nothing I have written can convey the poetry and beauty of the film. The plot never really engages as it would in a traditional film; it's more like a surface the characters can skate over on their way to growing up. Green said he was inspired by the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the adventure stories of Poe, Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, and modern crime stories like In Cold Blood. That seems like an unlikely list, until you see the film and realize it really does contain all of those inspirations. And lives up to them, too.

Man, my heart's pounding faster just reading that review. All the Real Girls felt like a step forward from George Washington. If this is an improvement, hey, bring it on. As far as filmmaking goes, this guy's the next generation's Terrence Malick.

Yeah, I'm excited as well. He seems VERY genuine ... real ... honest. You can just get lost in his films and I'm glad to hear it sounds like this one is solid as well. I liked All the Real Girls more than George Washington as well. Think I just related to the honest handling of love in the film.

I saw it up here in Toronto and really liked it a lot. I haven't seen All The Real Girls, so I can only compare it to George Washington, which I also liked quite a bit.

Undertow is much more direct and "conventional" than his first film, as it's primarily a thriller/"road movie" type film. And yet there's an amazing otherness and mythical-ness about it (as I watched it, Night Of The Hunter was constantly in the back of my mind). The film's setting is incredible; it's not the American South as it really is, but rather the South as seen through the lens of the Brothers Grimm (in the Q&A session following the film, Green stated he really wanted the film to have a fairy tale-esque feel) and Flannery O'Connor.

Green was also at the screening I attended, and he seems like a really great guy. Very humble and unassuming.

This is great news! Ebert expresses the exact things I've been trying to convey about this filmmaker.

So, is this a planned fall release, or do we have to wait until 2005 for this movie?

So far I've seen an October 29th limited release, but no news on the wide release.

There's an interview with Green in Filmmaker Magazine. The whole thing is interesting (apparently, Green wants to make a 3-hour, Tarkovsky-esque sci-fi movie at some point), but I found this especially interesting...

Here's the film's website, along with the trailer mentioned earlier.

I've never seen the trailer until now, and unfortunately, it emphasizes the whole suspense/thriller side of the movie, which is only one part of it (and a somewhat minor part, IMHO). This movie is a thriller the way Night Of The Hunter is a thriller... there's suspense and thrills sure, but the film is far moodier and more contemplative - not too mention artistic - than that.

I'll probably be more kind in my writeup, but I honestly don't care for the story in the film. The best character -- the only character that's remotely interesting -- doesn't last long, so you're left with a bunch of vacuous simpletons who wander around in an expansive game of hide and seek, but none of them are interesting enough to care about.

It's sad what happened to the Munn kids though, especially if the story, like they say, is true.

It's not a poorly made film, but it's not great either. But even as an extraordinary story, it's portrayed here in a mediocre manner.

So don't get your hopes up too high.

-s.

I saw this Sunday night and have been meaning to comment on it, but I've kind of been reluctant to react. I wanted to give things time to percolate. After a few days though, I will say that I was disappointed. The story was so-so. More interesting to me than most of the main characters were some of the people that come into the story for single scenes. Since this is something of a road movie, there's a good bit of that, and a couple of times I found those side characters more interesting and engaging than what was going on with the main characters.

The other thing for me is thinking about this in relation to, or maybe in contrast to the previous two Green films. I liked those, especially All the Real Girls, and what I liked so much about them I felt was either missing or muted in this film - that being a sort of lyrical quality. I've thought of his previous two films as poems, now remembering, more than story, but also colors, a certain musical quality, etc. Here he is tied more to conventional elements, and while the setting is still palpable at times, it doesn't come through so strongly.

One things I really like is the fascination he has with these small towns, these rural areas where his films inevitably take place. It seems to me that he has a certain affection for these places, and he's interested in showing us something of real life, a life that is removed from malls and 10-lane highways. It's as if he believes there's something in those rural places that we in the cities miss out on.

Green attended the screening I was at, and his comments afterward did help a bit. A lot of what he's doing here is an homage to films he enjoys, not the least of which is Night of the Hunter, which if you've seen it, will be immediately obvious to you. That helped to explain a number of his choices regarding things like the opening credit sequence and certain cuts he makes throughout.

(sort of)

More than that though, was his intention to look at a 'true' story like this, a story that is obviously filled with holes, and see what that tells us about the way kids (and possibly just people in general) talk about their fears, their doubts, bravery, etc. This story becomes an exaggeration in certain ways, and while that became clear to me through the film, the overall product still felt uneven and sort of underwhelming.

While this is somewhat disappointing, I like that he's still trying things. He's definitely doing something different here than in previous films, which makes me look forward to the next one.

CHUD's Review. It's fairly indepth, and possibly spoiler-ish. However, I thought this was interesting, and having liked the film a bit more than others here, I'd probably agree.

Finally saw this and was a little disappointed. I just wasn't feeling the story so much and some of the dialogue just felt forced as in ... you could just tell it was something he wanted to throw in there as a writer to say "this is cool and whatnot" ... sorry I'm not describing it well ... it's been a long day! I appreciate his originality and nods to his influences and look forward to future films from him though.



The most I've cringed at a film moment in a long time was the "stepping on the nail" scene. I also like how he realistically showed the fight b/t the brothers along with the sound of the fight (not all effects and whatnot), but more like an actual fight would look and sound.

This week, I've seen two films about men trying to cope with the deaths of their wives while raising two sons.

Winter Solstice was one. Wonderful, meditative, beautifully filmed, and relatively overlooked by moviegoers, left to be discovered on DVD.

Undertow was the other. Wonderful, meditative, beautifully filmed, and relatively overlooked by moviegoers, left to be discovered on DVD.

And yet they're entirely different.

And I love them both.

Winter Solstice almost suffers for its lack of plot. In its attempt to avoid conventional events, it's almost too strange, too strained. But still, I can't get it out of my head, and I'm thinking it's one of the best things I've seen this year.

Undertow almost suffers because whenever the plot gets going, it almost spoils the graceful style of the thing, as if David Gordon Green is saying, "Aw, shucks, I agreed to direct a thriller, didn't I?"

Anyway, they're both worth catching, and hopefully they'll get overdue attention when critics post their best-of lists at the end of 2005.

I'm glad to see someone else liked this movie. I agree completely that its best moments are its quietest. I can't wait to see what Green does next.