Undertow - "Billy Elliot the Uncle Slayer"

Undertow (2004)

H: Right from the start this movie was very violent and disturbing. When the kid landed on the board with the nail in it and it went through is foot, it was harder to watch than people dying in some movies. It was a good thriller that kept you engaged. It's also scary what the uncle was capable of. I wanted to make popcorn during the movie, but I couldn't pause it because I was afraid of what would happen when while it was paused.

K: The sons and the father are all quiet characters. They use as few words as possible. You're uneasy about these relationships right away, because the dad is mad at the son, the son is always in trouble. From the start you're seeing physical things. When the uncle arrives at the house, you understand the dynamic between the dad and the sons. You have to see them as a unit, and then include this loud brother who tells stories. You don't hear the dad tell stories until he has to explain the coins. With the uncle, it's a given that he's bad. You're uneasy when he comes in his sports car.

H: The dad is very quiet until the end - not the end of the movie but the end of his tenure on earth - when he starts to open up to his sons, in that speech where he talks about the coins. It's the most he speaks in the whole movie, like getting his last wisdom transmitted to the boys.

I was surprised when the dad walked in on his brother slicing open the painting and getting out the coins how violent the dad could be protecting his homestead. I was expecting him to be passive. When you look at his sons, he's more like Tim than he is like Chris, so you expect him to be the Tim in the situation, but he's not. He's just as strong and violent as the uncle. He knows when to use violence and you never see him violent with his sons. When you see him pick up Chris at the police station - and this was surprising - he wasn't violent with Chris, he was just disappointed. He was how any good dad would be. He told Chris that he'd ruined his brother's birthday. The dad is definitely able to control his violence and wield it when it's appropriate. How much do you think his brother, the uncle, was right about the accusations he made? The uncle claimed that the dad took his girl, he turned their father against him, he's raising the uncle's son, he lied about the gold coins...

K: The uncle speaks some truth. It adds to why the dad took his sons out to the sticks. The dad was trying to run away from what he had done and he's trying to establish this life where it's brand new for him. He's going to raise his sons the way he wants to and he can't run into that whole thing again, that his wife died. He can move on by raising his sons in this isolated area. There's some truth to it. When the uncle first asked him about the coins, he knew the dad was lying but the dad wasn't doing it out of greed.

H: Yeah, he kept the coins locked away. He used one and it was bad luck.

K: The dad wasn't choosing to hurt his brother, he was being really honest with how he wanted to forgive. By doing that, he had to protect the uncle as well, by lying about the coins.

H: I want to go back to what you said about why the dad moved out to the sticks. He left because of how he felt about what he'd done. Monks in early Christianity moved out to the desert to be away from civilization because, one, to get away from it's corrupting influences and two, if you're not part of a civilization, if you're not around people, you can't do any harm to people. You really are an island and you can't corrupt and you can't be corrupted, theoretically anyway. His policy was head down, hard work, let's not think about my wife's death, my relationship with my brother (the uncle).

K: That's why the dad pushes Chris so hard to be responsible about his work, so that girls aren't a distraction, trouble isn't a distraction, you just have to do it. He kept talking about how you have to be responsible for your work, but at the same time Chris had that instilled in him because he would talk about it too. His father taught him the importance of hard work, because when he runs away with Tim, the first thing they do is seek out hard work.

H: We know the true origin of the coins, namely that the grandfather stole the Mexican coins from a museum. Why does the dad tell a fable surrounding the coins? Why does he connect it to the Greco-Roman tradition of Cheron and the ferry?

K: The dad wants to raise his family, the boys, in this intellectual way. He had a painting made of them. Tim is reading all of those books.

H: These are intellectual hallmarks.

K: Exactly. It's not just cleaning up after the pigs, there are all these levels to it. The dad wants this gentle idea guiding him as he raises the boy. Not something that has to do with violence or stealing, but more like...

H: Generosity and mystery? When writing a story or making a film, the way this works thematically is it fortells the dad's death and works to perpetuate the importance of the gold, and tying it to his death, and tying it to greed. This movie's like a parable in that respect. It reminds me of this story, and I don't know if it's one of the Canterbury Tales, but these people find "death" and "death" is a pot of treasure. They end up killing each other over it, as if to say money is literally death.

What do you think about Tim giving away books wherever he goes? I didn't expect this from this story. It's really a story about the coming of age of a young author, of a Southern author. Tim is well on his way to becoming a storyteller. The start of the movie has the maternal grandfather narrating "This is what happened to my grandsons as told to me". I think Tim was the primary source for the narrative. He's like a Johnny Appleseed of books. It's his way of propogating what his dad gave him.

K: When thrillers are made with kids...

H: Home Alone (1990), The Client (1994)...

K: The kids always have something the adult wants. So, there has to be something that protects them. If they're a weak child, physically weak, then they're strong mentally. This is usually the case, because how can a child defend themselves against an adult. Tim's knowledge is different because he - and we can go into that whole self-medicating thing - was really aware of himself and his limitations. Chris was aware of how to protect them both, but Tim had to be aware of his own illness. Him eating all that strange stuff hurts the argument, but he doesn't use his dad to his advantage against Chris. His dad doesn't make him work as hard, but he doesn't use that to his advantage at all. That speaks to his character. He's aware of this advantage, but he doesn't use it.

H: If we think of the dad as being a whole person, we can think of his sons as being the division between body and mind. Tim is mind, Chris is body. Together, they can outwit their uncle and they cohese. They represent that idea, that division.

K: With the idea of children having to protect themselves, this movie reminded me so much of The Night of the Hunter (1955). In that movie, you have this person who comes out of nowhere that gets invited in but are hiding this evil side of them. They preach while they're there. In "The Night of the Hunter", it was a religious man. In this movie, there was the dream that the uncle explained, about eating too much and he finishes it by eating. He preaches to Chris in the car a little bit and he can provide answers.

H: It's the whole vampire thing where you invite the evil into your own home. Going back to the dream with the pilgrims, right away when the uncle was telling that dream it signaled to me DANGER. That was a persecution dream. He was being persecuted by these pilgrims. The uncle has a huge persecution complex. He blames his brother (the dad) for all the things that he himself did wrong and all the things in his life that went badly.

What do you think about the name of this movie? I think it should have been called "Chiggers". The wound chiggers leave is bigger than they're whole bodies, than what you'd think they'd be capable of.

K: This should be called "Billy Elliot 2: Ballet Nightmare".

H: I'm just waiting for "Chiggers 2: Search for the Golden Coins.