Some things
in life just shouldn’t happen. Being left at the alter, your best
friend sleeping with your significant other, white shoes after Labor
Day, George Bush being President; things like that. But, with all
events in life, you make the best out of the bad ones that you can,
doing your best to still smack a home run even if that hanging curve
ball thrown your way suddenly dips down into a nasty dipping slider.
Some things,
however, are a little bit more difficult to weather. Take estranged
couple Daniel (Daniel Travis) and Susan (Blanchard Ryan). Doing their
best to repair their marriage by taking a trip to a tropical paradise,
the duo head out on a day cruise and underwater dive. Everything goes
splendidly; the undersea life is amazing and the two of them have so
much fun they think nothing of swimming away from the rest of their
shipmates to explore on their own. Bad move, for upon returning to the
surface, the supervisors on the boat have miscounted their passengers
and, thinking they’ve gotten everyone aboard, head back to shore sans
Dan and Suz.
Miles from
any shore, they can’t even see it, and with no food, other than a few
specs of hard candy, and no water, despite being surrounded by a ocean
full of it, the couple suddenly find themselves on the other end of
the food chain. Surrounded by all types of aquatic life; pesky cleaner
fish, marauding fleets of jellyfish, various types of interested
sharks; Daniel and Susan do their best to keep their spirits alive.
But with each ticking hour, each lap of a wave against their face,
their chances of survival decrease until all hope can’t help but feel
lost.
Such is the
scenario of “Open Water,” a ‘what if’ flick inspired by true events
and nearly as gut wrenching as the description sounds. This is a movie
that threw me into an emotional wringer, my intestines wound so tight
by the end I was sure they were going to burst right through my belly
button. It took a quarter of a century for moviegoers to finally feel
willing to get back in the water after seeing “Jaws,” now after this I
may never set my toe in a bathtub – let alone the ocean – again.
Granted,
filmmaking couple Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (1997’s “Grind,” not to
be confused with last year’s execrable skate board comedy of the same
name) stretch their one-joke movie to the breaking point, taking a
60-minute idea and turning it into an 80-minute movie. And boy is that
opening stretch near unbearable. The duo’s writing is absurdly
moribund, and I kept waiting for a script doctor to show up and demand
a rewrite. It’s as if David Mamet and Dr. Ruth tried to collaborate on
a screenplay, these early moments of lovers discontented enough to
make even the most easygoing viewer want to gag.
Not that the
actors do much to help the cause. Travis and Ryan act these opening
scenes like they’re trying out for an Off-Off-Off Broadway
production, delivering their lines with a flat, monotone efficiency
that had me thinking they were more like Nordstrom mannequins stiffly
displaying clothes than a married couple passionately working through
their differences. It’s not that their terrible, it’s that they’re
delivery is just so muted and indistinct you’d believe they were
transparent, causing me to wonder if this highly buzzed Sundance
favorite was going to be nothing more than water logged bust.
But then the
boat leaves them, and the performers and the film come to breathtaking
life. How much of that is due to the skill of the actors I cannot say.
Filmed on a shoestring budget, Kentis and Lau did the only thing
available to them after realizing there was no money for digital or
animatronic sharks: They put the cast in the middle of the ocean with
real ones. This, of course, lends a sense of heightened reality to the
proceedings Spielberg could never have hoped for, and while his
picture remains the scary-as-hell classic of the two, “Open Water”
sure as heck takes the prize for sheer pulse-pounding audacity.
Doing their
own cinematography, I just loved how Kentis and Lau would slowly
submerge the camera, putting me on the same level as the stranded
divers with waves bobbing up and over making me feel just as helpless
and claustrophobic as Dan and Susan. I never knew what was going to
come next, so when sharks rub up against the duo for the first time I
nearly leapt so far out of my fourth row seat a fellow critic sitting
near the rear had to move his bag of popcorn. The filmmakers unsettle
the viewer, slowly at first, and then little by little a bit more,
submerging us along with the actors while their color palate moves
from rich blues and greens to murky grays as things progress.
