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Remember, this is supposed to be a vacation
By Christian De Matteo
SUPER About a year ago one of my students (I teach English and
Writing on the college level) completed an assignment for me, a
movie review, on the movie Open Water.
The little f**ker ruined the ending for me. I was not pleased. After that, having
been very excited from the start to see the movie, I began
hearing negative reviews about it. Lots of people
complaining that it was boring (a concern I'd had already
about a movie focusing almost entirely on two characters for
over an hour), stupid and that nothing happened. |
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I'd been excited about the film because I thought if you
were a good enough writer, with such a stripped down set-up,
you could really make a great character study with just two
people and still have it be suspenseful. According to
the reports I was getting, the creative team, husband and
wife Chris Kentis and Laura Lao, had failed to do that.
Having a great many movies I wanted to see, I pushed it off
my "to see" list. Well, the reports were
wrong. Rob Reilly (our favorite, the writer/director
of Back
to Manhattan and the upcoming
Frankie and Paulie's Big Scratch) insisted on loaning me
the DVD last week, saying I had to watch it. He also
insisted I see four others and I left with quite a catch to
catch up on. Ironically, I started with the Kevin
Spacey starrer Swimming with Sharks, and after watching it
decided it was only natural that I follow up that title with
Open Water about... well, about swimming with sharks. |
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Rob was right. Open Water is a terrific film.
First we must grant that the film is given an inherent
terror by the very concept of being left in the middle of
the ocean by your tour boat and being forgotten.
That's damn scary. Add to that, for me, that I can't
even float, let alone swim and the idea of being underwater
gives me the same response that most people have with
claustrophobia and I was knew I'd be scared... if it was
well done. And it is. Open Water is a quiet film
and yet every moment from the disappearance of the tour boat
is filled with the horror and fright of being abandoned into
a world of predators where you honestly can't do a damn
thing about it. The screenplay smartly keeps
the couple, either a husband and wife or live-in lovers,
always in character, allowing the viewer a constant reality
check that adds to the fear. Nothing about this is
outlandish, nothing about this impossible and nothing about
the two main characters doesn't ring true for two people who
know each other very well in an awful situation. From
the joking male and the nervous but collected female all the
way to the blame game and the eventual reminders of how much
one loves the other when things look most dire, the film
progresses so realistically one feels often like they are in
the water with them. And that's where the
fear comes in. Unable to control events and
unable to see below them without diving under, Susan and
Daniel are, as Daniel puts it when he finally freaks out,
"shark bait." All they can do proactively is wait.
To swim is to possibly swim in the wrong direction and
overly excite the water in a shark infested tropic. To
wait, however, is maddening. When things start bumping
into their legs and on those rare occasions when the viewer
gets to see what the characters can't, the stomach
tightening really begins. Very sharp on the part of
this creative team, we are allowed first to sink deep into
our own, "Damn, that must be awful," and "Oh, that's creepy"
before the sharks truly make their appearance and all we
then can think is, "Holy s**t!" as we jump out of our skin.
So why did so many people dislike it? My theory:
For the same reason so many people aren't effected anymore
by stories about the devil. We live in a society that
has separated itself from its belief in evil, and in the
process separated itself from its empathy. Most of us
when going to a horror movie are no longer their for the
terror of wondering if our heroes will survive. A true
Roman-worthy, Bread and Circus society, we go for the gore.
We go to root on the bad guy hoping he'll catch up to those
silly drug-taking, sex-having teens and slaughter them all
in equally grisly and imaginative ways. Open
Water is not about this. The blood factor is very low
and it earns its R-rating mostly on a fantastic and
beautifully shot nude scene developed to show the level of
intimacy and slowing passion between two people who have
been together so long they know each other like the backs of
their hands. Looking gorgeous, womanly, and feminine,
but also perfectly natural, actress Blanchard Ryan is
captured by the camera as a woman in a long relationship.
Her lying on the bed stark naked reading doesn't mean she
wants to have sex, but rather that she's comfortable enough
with her man to be that way. The R-rating, therefore
is not earned for a two hour feeding frenzy but rather for
character development that pays off big time when we get to
see how these two are together during a disaster scenario.
Unfortunately for those who go to see the Christians
(self-referential- yes) thrown to the lions, this doesn't do
the trick. Me, I can't imagine being at all
bored at any point in this movie, the first five minutes of
set-up excepted, because I can't help but truly feel for the
couple. Open Water is not about gore, or
fun/get-your-rocks-off scares. It's about TRUE horror
and the fact that it clearly advertises almost as a
sub-title, BASED ON TRUE EVENTS should alert the viewer that
these are not, in fact, stupid teens screwing their way
through a camping trip that we want to see skewered.
The film is about compassion and feeling fear for other
human beings. In some ways, it exists
accidentally as a kind of Rorschach test: Beware those
who don't care about Susan and Daniel... and certainly don't
go on vacation with them. |
