Under Still Waters (2008)

Don't listen to the negative reviews

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

I thought I had this all figured out from the first 5 minutes. I only picked this movie due to Jason Clarke and Clifton Collins Jr. But no, I was wrong and very surprised to find out how good this really was. Under Still Waters has a twisty plot that holds your attention for every small little detail. Makes you want to watch it again just to see what you might have missed. I had no idea what was going to happen and I had no idea who did what and why.Didn't see the end coming and it nearly hit me with a brick when it did. Really good movie and the characters were perfectly casted. Beautiful location too, everything was great about this movie, well done.

There's one piece of advice I would like to give any screenwriter or filmmaker out there who wants to make a good drama. It's advice I wish someone had given writer/director Carolyn Miller before she put one finger on her keyboard or shot her first minute of footage. Always ask yourself "what would happen to my story if any of my characters had a sense of humor?" If your movie relies on a total lack of self-deprecation, if it needs complete obliviousness to the potential comedy of its situations and behavior, if it has to have every single solitary second submerged in utter, unreflective seriousness, that's a bad drama you're making.I'm not talking about having your leads cracking jokes or playing a minor role for comic relief. I'm talking about a tale where the drama comes not from the conflict or danger inherent to the story but from how dourly earnest everyone is. If throwing a few laughs at your audience or letting your characters make fun of themselves and the pickle they're in would ruin the tension you're trying to build, you're not building it the right way.That's what is wrong with Under Still Waters. The gravity or import or emotional force in this motion picture doesn't grow organically. It is imposed on the story by how sober and solemn the characters are about everything. Someone who takes things too seriously is a perfectly acceptable foundation upon which to construct your plot. In this case it would be Andrew (Jason Clarke), a man consumed by feelings of jealousy and insecurity over his beautiful wife and her rich family. The fact that Andrew can't put his pride aside and simply appreciate how good he has it is both believable and realistic. But his wife Charlie (Lake Bell) being just as pensive and somber? The working class hero (Clifton Collins Jr.) they almost run off the road only to take him back to their vacation home and pal around with him like he's a long lost friend, he's also as grave and unsmiling as a tomb? That just doesn't work.It's a problem tonally because it makes the film feel like a song with the same note played over and over and over again. It's a problem structurally because if any of these characters had the slightest variation in feeling, they wouldn't do any of the things they do. If Charlie were a bitch or a drama queen, her simultaneously supportive and emasculating behavior toward Andrew would make sense. If Clifton Collins was playing a bottom rung guy trying to take advantage of some rich people's problems to scramble up the ladder of success, his joining in Andrew's scheme would make sense. But making them both so unswervingly bleak robs them of any interior life and denies their actions any interesting motivation.If you're interested, the plot of Under Still Waters is right out of a Lifetime woman-in-peril flick with a few f-words thrown in and some poor actress in a bit part taking off her top. Andrew and Charlie are getting away for the weekend at their secluded country home. They nearly run Jacob (Clifton Collins Jr.) off the road and he winds up joining them. The triangle that results tries to produce sparks but mostly fizzles and then there's a couple of big reveals that are supposed to impress the viewer. It's far from an original story and the telling of it isn't all that clever. Since Lake Bell wasn't going to get naked, the only other thing it potentially could offer was some kind of fun and it fails at that.Writer/director Miller's work here isn't insulting or aggravating. She does succumb to the delusion that a boring story automatically becomes more involving if you tell in it in a non-linear way, but that's almost unavoidable nowadays. Her work as a whole, though, is professional. The cast all play the same note as well as they can. Under Still Waters isn't so much bad as wrongheaded.And if you think my theory about this is wrong, watch this thing and wait for a tattooed bar singer to show up. Her character has a sense of humor about things and see if it doesn't make her more appealing than everyone else.

About the only thing this would-be Hitchcock rip-off has going for it is a cool DVD cover picture of lead actress Lake Bell up to her chin in a lake. Unfortunately, this shot is NOT from a scene in the movie. Worse yet, this picture is more interesting than anything that actually IS shown in the film. In an apparent effort to seem clever, UNDER STILL WATERS writer\director Carolyn Miller throws in one after another increasingly incomprehensible plot twist as this lame flick nears its totally inscrutable finale. Apparently Miller feels viewers should be forced to read between the lines, and fill in all the blanks by extrapolating what the missing scenes would have looked like if she had been able to fit more of the script into her shooting schedule. I say, to heck with that. If I'm shelling out 50 cents to rent a movie, I do not want to be forced into doing $40,000 worth of "script doctor" work in my head in order to complete what the writer\director MAY have wished to convey on-screen (but failed abysmally to do so). If you have been able to stomach UNDER STILL WATERS all the way through to the end, ask yourself these questions: did deputy Buford REALLY exist, or was he just a figment of someone's imagination, and if so, whose? Better yet, whether real or imagined, WHY kill him?

This movie seems to be widely unknown, which doesn't surprise me, as it is a pretty poor movie in every way.I personally thought this movie was a disgrace. Its story was uninteresting and illogical, there wasn't a single character who could be described as interesting or likable, the film was very badly made, the settings and scenario were generally crude. The characters were very annoying and had absolutely no chemistry.I expected this to be a different kind of movie (from what I read about it before watching). What I got was the absurd story of a couple who meet a bandit. The woman seems to have a love affair with both men and at the end the good guy becomes bad and the bad guy is supposed to be the good guy?? What was *this*? No more comments.