There's an old Firesign Theatre bit from the Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers album that goes, "Honest stories of working people as told by rich Hollywood stars." This phrase always goes through my mind whenever I see a film that's even marginally of the Southern Gothic genre. Whether it's Jude Law's short-lived hustler in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Vivien Leigh's fluttery Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Sissy Spacek's dreamy-eyed Caryl Chessman in Terence Malick's Badlands, Bill Paxton's crazed fundie in Frailty, or the one decent performance in Ryan Phillippe's career in Little Boy Blue, it's difficult to have the sense when watching cinematic treatments of Southern Gothic that you're seeing something real. The noses are too straight, the eyes too blue, the teeth too white, the bodies too perfect. You want to see Southern Gothic, check out Twila Tanner on this season's Survivor Vanuatu. Now THAT's real.

It's fortuitous, then, that UNDERTOW, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival and recently opened at the New York Film Festival, is helmed by David Gordon Green, whose languid and lyrical All the Real Girls garnered three Cinemarati Award nominations last year. Greene is exactly the kind of quiet, mood-based filmmaker that a film like this needs to keep it from descending into grand guignol.

UNDERTOW, which the opening credits allude to being based on a true story, involves John Munn (Dermot Mulroney), a taciturn, none-too-successful widowed Georgia hog farmer who is raising his two sons Chris (Jamie Bell) and Tim (Devon Adam) away from civilization after the death of his wife. When his ex-con brother Deel (Josh Lucas) appears after his release from prison, the family's history, one of betrayal, lies, greed, and violence, is unveiled layer by layer.

Right from the beginning, it's apparent that UNDERTOW is directed by the same person who brought you All the Real Girls, as well as its cinematographer. In fact, the opening scene, in which Chris tentatively romances a tough-talking but sweet-faced girl, might as well have been an outtake from All the Real Girls: The Early Years. There are exactly two young girls who provide romantic fodder for young Chris, and both of the actresses portraying them are near dead-ringers for Zooey Deschanel. Tim Orr's camera captures both the rural beauty of the South in some indeterminate season that looks like summer but lacks the summer's humidity; and the lives of desperation lived by many of its denizens.

Unlike Greene's previous film, the languor that hovers over UNDERTOW is undercut once Deel arrives, accompanied by his ever-present aura of barely-concealed malevolence, which explodes in some rather graphically violent scenes made all the more stomach-churning by the overall lyricism of the rest of the film. The story that unfolds is entirely predictable, and in lesser hands could have resulted in an astoundingly bad film. Green, however, is wise enough to cast actors who don't need to chew scenery to portray dramatic tension. Dermot Mulroney, always understated, is appropriately taciturn, sometimes too much so, as John, a man with more secrets than he lets on. John clearly regards his older son Chris (Bell) with disfavor, and Jamie Bell imbues Chris with the sulkiness one would expect from an adolescent in this situation, but also gives him a dimension of tenderness in his relationship with the younger brother his father so clearly favors. It's Bell, last seen as a little boy in Billy Elliot, whose performance is the revelation here. With a trace of baby fat still lingering in his cheeks, now studded with a hint of acne, he's the most convincing as being actually part of this milieu.

The role of Deel inevitably falls to the unfortunate Josh Lucas. Lucas, a fine character actor who also happens to be hotter than a two-dollar pistol, seems to be making a career out of playing just this kind of redneck baddie, Sweet Home Alabama notwithstanding. With his hair slicked back and sporting some of the worst facial hair ever caught on film, Lucas, a Tennessean who fought mightily to conquer his Southern accent only to find himself playing white-trash villains over and over again, has the thankless task of trying to bring dimension to what could be just another cartoonish, sneering bad guy. It's to his credit that he manages to bring energy to this clumsily-written role without going over the top.

More interesting than the predictable plot twists, which a reasonably intelligent moviegoer will figure out every step of the way, are the vignettes of rural Southern life that Chris and Tim encounter as they flee from their evil uncle. A black couple, unable to have children, who farm goats...a possibly autistic auto mechanic...his wife who echoes Tim's unexplained bulimia with her chewing gum...an encampment of homeless people...a community of riverfront laborers. Based on the vintage of the automobiles, the film would appear to take place in the 1970's, but much of the rural south depicted seems to have not changed significantly since the 1930's.

There's no question that Green is a talented filmmaker with a signature style, even if that style is Terence Malick's. How well this style will wear over time is yet to be determined. Yet as long as he has Tim Orr's ability to capture the beauty of his locales, and the ability to cast his films with understated, fine performers, he can continue to produce interesting, if not groundbreaking films.

-- Jill Cozzi

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