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David Gordon Green burst on to the scene in 2001 with George Washington and made a bigger splash (at least in some circles) with All the Real Girls. His third film, Undertow returns to the South but in a more mythic vein. John Munn (Dermot Mulroney) and his two sons, Chris and Tim (Jamie Bell and Devon Alan), live in a dilapidated house far from town. The boys don't go to school, instead spending all their time working on their father's small farm. One day, John's younger brother Deel (Josh Lucas) shows up, and it doesn't take us long to find out he's up to no good. Apparently there's a dispute over some old Mexican gold coins. When things go badly between John and Deel, the two boys grab the coins and set off on their own, with Deel in hot pursuit.

It's hard not to think of Night of the Hunter as you're watching Undertow. Josh Lucas certainly doesn't have the screen presence of Robert Mitchum, nor does his character inspire the same kind of awe that Mitchum's did. Deel Munn is merely a redneck who thinks he has something coming to him, even if it requires killing his own blood.

One of the many disappointing things about Undertow is this stereotypical portrayal of Southern men. Both George Washington and All the Right Girls featured quirky characters from the South, but Green always emphasized their humanity and never stole their dignity. Indeed, his characters often did odd things (a boy wore a football helmet around town, a woman worked as a clown), but the movie didn't mock their choices. In Undertow, the brothers John and Deel are wrestling with family history, yet we never sympathize with the decisions they make. Why has John hidden his two boys in the middle of nowhere? Why is Deel absolutely obsessed with these gold pieces? Even if we knew, we wouldn't actually understand, as we're not meant to.

That leaves it to Chris and Tim to hold our interest. Yet, they're just as difficult to fathom as their older relatives. Tim spends most of his time tasting and eating stuff he clearly isn't supposed to (paint, oil), then throwing up. Chris opens the movie by throwing a rock through his young girlfriend's window and spends the rest of the movie looking surly. The brothers have some nice moments when they're on the run, but even there I kept thinking of better, older movies like Terence Malick's Badlands. It's no coincidence that Malick helped produce Undertow.

To keep our attention, Green litters his movie with odd freeze frames, slow-motion shots, and other editing tricks. My friend Garth found these effective, because they held his attention. They just seemed like bad gimmicks to me. I certainly can't fault Tim Orr's stunning cinematography. He has this amazing ability to find beauty in ugly things--his shots of junkyards and alleys are gorgeous and offer a much richer commentary on the odd aspects of our lives than Undertow's script.  

The script for David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees is a lot more complicated and full of big ideas, but I'm not sure it's any smarter. Like David Gordon Green, Russell is a relatively new director who burst on to the scene with the hilarious comedy Flirting with Disaster and then followed it up with the brilliant war movie Three Kings. Huckabees is his first movie in five years, and it's a return to the comedy genre, though with enough pop philosophy to keep college students going for a while. Think Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) but with more actors and bigger laughs.

The "more actors" includes Jason Schwartzman as a needy environmentalist who's been forced out of his own organization, Jude Law as the handsome marketing executive who's forced Schwartzman out, Naomi Watts as a model/spokesman who's living with Law, and Mark Wahlberg as a fireman who's obsessed with petroleum. All four of these characters end up coming to Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman, a husband-and-wife team who call themselves "existential detectives." They follow their clients around and try to make sense of their various lives. "Should I keep doing what I'm doing? Is it hopeless?" one of the clients asks, and Tomlin and Hoffman give them answers or facsimiles thereof. Isabelle Huppert, in a particularly witty role, plays a competing detective who specializes in nihilism.

_Huckabees_ is taking on the big, big issues of life, though its conclusions won't ruffle anyone's feathers. Of course, a Christian family is trotted out for ridicule, but the materialistic Law doesn't come off any better. In the end, the movie's happy ending contradicts its "life is hard" message, but Hollywood has never been one for consistency. On the other hand, the acting is strong. I haven't been a fan of Hoffman's for a while, but he's good here, spouting off gibberish as if he actually believes it. Naomi Watts takes the role of pretty young thing and transforms it into something deeper, and Schwartzman has some great lines as a put-upon idealist, though he's in danger of being typecast. More importantly, the movie's genuinely funny, even if it never rises to the hilarity of Flirting with Disaster.    

J. Robert Parks  10/17/2004