Thrilling, Restrained Melodrama

“The Deep End” is melodrama dressed up in its Sunday best. Exquisitely made with a mesmerizing sense of style, it shows the wonderful things that can happen when traditional material is both handled with care and adroitly updated.

Writer-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel understand the terrible power of melodrama. They not only know how compelling the noir staples of homicide and blackmail can be when transferred to the bright sunlight of middle-class America, they also know how to make these impossible dilemmas gripping and convincing.

Based on “The Blank Wall,” a 1940s novel by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, the rare suspense writer approved of by Raymond Chandler, “The Deep End’s” theatrical story of self-sacrifice and spoken and unspoken love revolves around a completely unlikely thriller heroine.

Margaret Hall is the mother of three, a couldn’t-be-more-traditional Navy wife who lives with her children and her borderline doddering father-in-law on the shores of Lake Tahoe while her husband spends months away at sea. She may be someone whose idea of a crisis is a glitch in carpool scheduling, but Margaret is a mother above all else, and when danger occurs, there turns out to be little she can’t or won’t do to protect her child.

To play this most conventional woman, “The Deep End” subversively cast a most unconventional actress, the remarkable Tilda Swinton. Though she’s starred in films for 15 years, the Scottish-born Swinton is largely unknown to American audiences because much of her excellent work has been for art house directors like Derek Jarman (“Caravaggio”) and Sally Potter (“Orlando”). Her performance here is quietly astonishing, a triumph of demure urgency and controlled desperation.

Margaret’s dilemma not only sounds like the plot of a 1940s Hollywood film, it was one. “The Blank Wall” was filmed once before, with Joan Bennett and James Mason starring for director Max Ophuls in the equally persuasive 1949 “The Reckless Moment.” The plot similarities between the two are naturally numerous, but the new film has shrewdly changed and updated a key story point.

While the 1949 film has Joan Bennett’s mother protective about the lecherous advances of an unscrupulous older man toward her innocent young daughter, Margaret has to contend with the more disturbing notion--for her--of an unscrupulous older man getting into a romantic relationship with her teenage son.

Reno club owner Darby Reese (Josh Lucas), the picture of bemused, rakish seductiveness, is the man in question. In addition to its metaphysical implications, “The Deep End” is the name of his establishment, and the film opens with Margaret knocking on its door on a hot Nevada morning, oblivious to how out of place she and her SUV look in front of it even in broad daylight, determined to get the oily Reese to stay away from her son.

That would be 17-year-old Beau (Jonathan Tucker), a high school senior and promising musician who gets all whiny and adolescent with his mother when she brings up the liaison, insisting she’s blowing it all out of proportion. Reese, however, knows better. “She’s a mother,” he tells the boy at a rendezvous at the family boat house, “not a moron.”

Reese is more right than he’s ever going to know. A web of coincidence, circumstance and accident leads to a very bad thing happening at that boat house and leaving Margaret all alone with the task of trying to prevent something almost as bad from happening to her son, all alone coping with crises she can see and those that completely blindside her.

Alek Spera (“ER’s” Goran Visnjic) is one of the latter. Dark, intense, with deep piercing eyes, he appears at her door and announces, “I came to talk about Darby Reese and your son.” As it did for James Mason, who played the part in 1949, his slight foreign accent makes what he says a bit more unnerving. Yet while his activities may be criminal, Alek is not a thug. Rather he’s that rare hard guy who is also capable of moral ambivalence, and his interplay with the increasingly frantic Margaret is “The Deep End” at its most effective.

Filmmakers McGehee and Siegel, who debuted with the less successful “Suture,” have here turned out something coolly confident and exquisitely controlled. They’ve understood how stylized restraint complements excessive material and, working with editor Lauren Zuckerman, they display an exact grasp of what to keep, what to emphasize and what to discard.

Peter Nashel’s deliberate, unsettling score is essential to setting the mood, but the biggest advantage in this regard is “The Deep End’s” peerless visual sense. Faultlessly lit, composed and shot by director of photography Giles Nuttgens (whose other credits run the considerable gamut from Deepa Mehta’s “Fire” to “Battlefield Earth”), “The Deep End” has a beautifully modulated color scheme (Kelly McGehee and Christopher Tandon do the superb production design) and the ability to utilize a wide variety of water imagery without overdoing the notion.

Finally, however, actress Swinton is this film’s greatest asset. By temperament and by necessity, Margaret is a woman who has learned to keep everything, especially her voice, under tight control. So Swinton’s performance, simultaneously emotionless and emotion-laden, uses an extraordinary range of facial expressions to benchmark the transformations her character undergoes. If you’re going to reinvent melodrama for modern times, there’s no one you’d rather have on your side.

MPAA rating: R, for some violence and language, and for a strong sex scene. Times guidelines: brief but fairly explicit sexuality.

‘The Deep End’

Tilda Swinton: Margaret Hall

Goran Visnjic: Alek Spera

Jonathan Tucker: Beau Hall

Peter Donat: Jack Hall

Josh Lucas: Darby Reese

Raymond Barry: Carlie Nagle

An i5 picture, released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel. Producers Scott McGehee, David Siegel. Executive producer Robert H. Nathan. Screenplay Scott McGehee & David Siegel, based on the novel “The Blank Wall” by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. Cinematographer Giles Nuttgens. Editor Lauren Zuckerman. Music Peter Nashel. Production design Kelly McGehee, Christopher Tandon. Set decorator Nancy Wenz. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes.

In limited release.