Director: Scott McGehee and David Siegel
Year Released: 2001
Rating: 2.0
After her grumpy son gets involved with a much older man (Josh Lucas) - who ends up dead on their gorgeous lake-front property with an anchor weighing him down - dutiful Mom (Tilda Swinton) has to dispose of the body, bargain with the blackmailer (Goran Visnjic) and pick up the rest of her kin from after-school projects (the horror!). The Visnjic storyline (and where it ends up) is poorly developed and doesn't quite add up (its intentional vagueness is a liability) and some of the characters' decisions come out of nowhere (Swinton, in particular, makes some dumb moves but never gets caught) though it helps to think of all this in much broader terms: of a mother's preservation of an illusory 'normal' family even when it's anything but, with the incriminating videotape of her son engaging in anal sex not proving he's a murderer but that he's a homosexual. In the absence of the father, Swinton is assigned leader of the household: the concluding shot has the "family" re-united, with Dad finally telephoning in to 'complete' the union and bring everyone together again, which is everything you'd expect from two students of film like McGehee and Siegel.
