When it comes to finding talent in movies, all you have to do is tell her everyone gets their start in porn. Wait, this column is about watching movies?
When it comes to finding talent in movies, if often pays to check out the back catalog of a director who's caught your eye. Before Pineapple Express, one of the goofier, funnier action movies of recent times, I'd never heard of director David Gordon Green. Usually when I haven't heard of someone I can only assume they're not worth hearing about and will no doubt die in penniless, unshowered obscurity. But you have to keep an open mind about these things, and when the opportunity comes, you have to accept that director's enormous cash bribe and watch their 2004 feature Undertow.
After the death of his wife, Dermot Mulroney took his two boys out to a farm in Georgia to live in isolation. Years later, estranged brother Josh Lucas shows up in need of a place to stay. He lets Mulroney thinks he's come to mend the past, but what he's really looking for is the gold coins he believes Mulroney took after their thieving dad died.
"Sometimes it's the strange moments that stick with you," Mulroney tells his troublemaking son Jamie Bell early on in the film. Undertow takes that on as a mission statement, doling out snippets of oddity like Mulroney eating cake while the TV sings about Jesus, or his younger kid slurping paint until he barfs, or lecturing Bell on the theoretical nature of person-sized chiggers.
Undertow has so many of these small, strange moments it sometimes wrestles with keeping track of the bigger picture, especially after the two boys go on the run through a scuzzy vision of the South, tumbling into The Traumatizing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
But man, are their episodes a lot of fun -- funny, grimy, unpredictable, packed with personality, delivered through sharp dialogue and stylish, unobtrusive camera work. On the list of people tapped to direct a boisterous action-comedy like Pineapple Express, I'd expect Green to have been right near the bottom, just after this pile of fireworks and Michael Bay's malformed vat-clone. After Undertow, I can see why it worked so well. Here's hoping for a long career.
