Deepwater

I heard about DEEPWATER since very long because it has the same title of a 2016 thriller set on a submarine but this DEEPWATER has a different setting. Last summer I finally saw it and despite the downer of a ending I kinda liked it. Nat Banyon (Lucas Black) is a hitch-hiker that has the dream of opening a ostrich farm in Wyoming and when the movie begins Nat gets involved in a bar fight and manages to steal the keys of one guy and steal his car, only to find Herman Finch (Peter Coyote) under his overturned car, save him just before a truck passes and destroys the car. As a token of gratitude Finch employs Nat as his motel's handyman. What follows are a series of misadventures caused by Nat's smittening with Finch's wife Iris, a fight that was a joke and the final showdown with Finch where Nat loses and is then caught by the police since everyone who opposes with Finch is believed lost and then found dead, so Nat must have been lucky. Soon we find out that Nat is probably mentally ill suffering of some personality disorder, and we are left to wander if his affection for Iris was one of his many delusions (in fact when he is taken to the mental hospital he often mumbles about the baby ostriches he'll never have). Up until the last 30 minutes I liked most of the characters and the wicked humour, but in the last half-hour I felt sorry that Nat was taken to a mental hospital because I would have loved to see him achieve his dream of open a ostrich farm and maybe go away with Iris. The cast (Black, Coyote, Xander Berkeley, Kristen Bell and Michael Ironside) did a fine job with the material given but as I said, if it wasn't for the ending I would have given a higher score (and I was about to give it a 8). Overall, not a bad movie but considering the ending I would have loved a re-write or an alternative ending.

Deepwater 2005 suffers from a lack of plot. The scenes are not well connected. I think the main flaws are in the storyline and the director does not know where he is going with this film. It is pretty amateurish despite good efforts from main actors.

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.

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.

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

Anyone who appreciated original film noir will appreciate this offering, a film which applies Nat Banyan's perceptions through the camera, at times we do not realize what we are seeing and visualizing, until we really begin to analyze its meaning, and possible interpretations. Peter Coyote is excellent as the eccentric owner of the Deepwater Motel. Its environs remind one of Hitchcock's Bates Motel from "Psycho". Lucas Black is believable as Nat Banyan, a drifter and handyman who works on the motel for a time. There are many twists and turns, and excellent cameos by Michael Ironside as a used car salesman, and Lesley Ann Warren as a down and out waitress. Coyote was amazing in his characterization and earns the film ten stars. Highly recommended.

I will confess that the choices that director Marfield has made concerning cast and crew make me somewhat more sympathetic towards "Deepwater" than I otherwise might have been. Lucas Black is an underrated actor who deserves bigger roles and Charlie Clouser's NiN-like music suits the mood of the film very well. But I think the film has merits of its own. Compared to fellow indie/festival flick "Down in the Valley", which has some interesting similarities, "Deepwater" feels much more genuine to me. A young man just out of ... well, some sort institution winds up in a small town working for a strange fellow (Peter Coyote) and lusting for his wife (Maestro). What initially seems like U- turn revisited turns out to be a quite different film in the end. The acting (mainly from washed-out but cool actors apart from Black) and the mood keep you fairly interested and the fairly down-to-earth tone that the film finally adopts work fine if you ask me. Worth watching, although not a masterpiece by any standard.

Nat (Black) is a stand up kid from his point of view. Which is about the only point of view during the entire movie. He is traveling to California to start over and build a life when he meets Finch (Coyote) and his very young wife Iris (Maestro) who run a hotel called Deepwater, among other side jobs, in rural America. Finch convinces Nat to stay and help fix up the place. Nat gets all sorts of ideas about the other characters. But in the end, everything is not as it appears for Nat. The psychological plot of the film is kept at bay while the seasoned acting keeps your attention over the length of the film. Some action aficionados would find it boring. I would classify it more as a drama than a thriller.

A Southern boy (Lucas Black) gets a job working at a motel near an Indian reservation and casino. He discovers that the motel owner (Peter Coyote), a 1/8 Indian, is involved in a corrupt scheme with his Indian friends to get control of the casino. Some people are killed and the Southern boy believes the motel owner is responsible. The Southern boy has a fling with a waitress (Lesley Ann Warren), but becomes obsessed with the motel owner's wife (Mia Maestro). The boy hatches a plan to steal the husband's cash and run away with the wife. Before he does, he must engage in a challenge boxing match with the motel owner, an aging former pro boxer. The cast of characters in this movie are very interesting and the acting is really good. The atmosphere is eerie. This movie held my interest completely and I am easily bored. This movie deserves better than the 5.0 rating at this writing. I grade it an 8.

I cannot quite get a handle on this film. It was interesting enough to keep me interested, but I am still not sure what I saw. Lucas Black (The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Sling Blade) is ostensibly released from a mental institution - or was he? He meets Peter Coyote, who is a really strange guy with his hand in everything. He also has a hot wife in Mía Maestro (The Motorcycle Diaries, Frida) who has an affair with Black - or does she? People start dropping dead and it is difficult to figure out just who is doing the killing. Is it Black or is it Coyote or is it imagined? I just wish I knew what I have just seen.