***Something About Mom- Tilda Swinton’s “The Deep End”

DVD Review

The Deep End, starring Tilda Swinton, Fox Productions, 2001

A while back I was listening to a “high brow”talking- head discussion about the sea-change that has been occurring in the way American parenting has evolved over the past thirty years or so (the speakers however covered themselves with the caveat that this trend excludes certain ethnic, racial, cultural and class exceptions, in short, this was about how middle, now middle, and upper class parents raise their progeny). The gist of the argument is that the new “coddle” generation (say those under thirty, okay) have never learned to fail, parents have never allowed them to experience failure, and therefore they have never learned how to fly out of the nest unaided and therefore are ill-equipped to face the wicked old world and its snares. And that seems pretty close to some personal anecdotal evidence I have accumulated over the years.

Subsequently I watched this film, The Deep End, which seems to be nothing but a homage to the trend those speakers spoke of- “coddle” nation. Here dear old mom (well not so old, at least not so old looking, played by Tilda Swinton) has to play mom and dad (dad off flying planes somewhere) and is forced to “pick up” after her teenage sonny boy. Seems he had a torrid love affair with an older man, the older man, a sleaze, tried to put the dough bite on mom to keep things quiet, sonny boy didn’t like that when he found out and confronted that older man about it. Older man fell off the family pier, was impaled by an inconvenient anchor, where the confrontation took pace and the chase was on, for mom that is. She could see where sonny boy could take the big step for this one. Sonny boy just kind of went about his teen alienated way.

First mom, no problem, disposed of the incriminating older man’s body, including a dip in the lake to help let it sink. Then all hell breaks loose. It seems that the older man took some very compromising video of the pair having sex and that video would up in exactly the wrong hands, some sleaze associate and his enforcer. So blackmail, big time blackmail entered the scene. Of course mom had no serious ready cash on hand when the enforcer man came calling and so things deteriorated from there, although ever resourceful mom tried every avenue, including hocking her jewels, to come up with the dough. The squeeze was on though from the sleaze associate, although the enforcer, kind of smitten with mom and her pluckiness, started going to bat for her, and lost his own life over it in the end. That messy battle over with life went back to normal. With sonny boy head in the clouds, not a care in the world. Now that I think of it though I wouldn’t have minded a mom like that although with my own hard-faced mom I learned to face this wicked old world, and survive.