Chris is in rebellion against the isolated life created for them by their father John (Dermot Mulroney). So is Tim (Devon Allen), but in an internal way, expressed by the peculiar things he eats and the chronic stomach pain that results. When their uncle Deel (Josh Lucas) appears, he is at first a welcome change, with his laid-back permissiveness. John asks Deel to watch the kids during the day while he's at work, but Deel is not very good at this, and points his nephews toward more trouble than he saves them from.
The bad feeling over the gold coins comes to a head in an instant of violence, and the boys run away from home, entering a world that evokes "The Night of the Hunter" (1955). In both films, two siblings flee from a violent man through a haunted and dreamy Southern landscape. The people they meet during their flight all look and sound real enough, but also have the qualities of strangers encountered in fantasies: The kindly black couple who lets them work for food, and the secret community of other kids, living in a junkyard. If these passages add up to a chase scene, Green directs not for thrills but for deeper, more ominous feelings, and the music by Philip Glass doesn't heighten, as it would during a conventional chase scene, but deepens, as if the chase is descending into ominous dreads.
Green has a visual style that is beautiful without being pretty. We never catch him photographing anything for its scenic or decorative effect. Instead, his landscapes have the kind of underlined ambiguity you'd find in the work of a serious painter; these are not trees and swamps and rivers, but Trees and Swamps and Rivers -- it's here that the parallel with "Night of the Hunter" is most visible.
"Undertow" is the closest Green has come to a conventional narrative, although at times you can sense him pulling away from narrative requirements to stay a little longer in a moment that fascinates him. He is not a director of plots so much as a director of tones, emotions and moments of truth, and there's a sense of gathering fate even in the lighter scenes. His films remind me of "Days of Heaven," by Terrence Malick (one of this film's producers), in the way they are told as memories, as if all of this happened and is over with and cannot be changed; you watch a Green film not to see what will happen, but to see what did happen.
Films like "Undertow" leave some audiences unsettled, because they do not proceed predictably according to the rules. But they are immediately available to our emotions, and we fall into a kind of waking trance, as if being told a story at an age when we half-believed everything we heard. It takes us a while to get back to our baseline; Green takes us to that place where we keep feelings that we treasure, but are a little afraid of.
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