Movie Review - Dark Water

Mini-Review: Oddly disappointing.

It took me a while to figure out why Dark Water just didn't cut the mustard for me. I thought about it afterwards, and lined it all up in my head. A spectacular performance from Jennifer Connelly? Check. (Come to think of it, the mere presence of the spectacular Jennifer Connelly? Check.) Great supporting cast? Check. Some decent jump moments? Check. Good cinema and scenes? Check. Plot? Well... on paper, check. It's just too bad it didn't quite work out as thrillingly as it could have. We'll get to that in a minute.

The cast, like I said, is spot on. Connelly nails her role as a protective mother with a spotty childhood who's going through a messy divorce. The kid actor they cast was perfect for her role. Tim Roth is always excellent, and here he even gets to play a role that isn't his typecast neurotic-skinny-guy typical part. Hopefully he'll start to get more of those. And then there's John C Reilly, and Pete Postlethwaite (or as I like to call him, Kobayashi). Both are excellent.

The plot starts out all right too. Connelly, like I said, is in a crappy divorce and custody hearing, and is looking for a place to move to with her daughter. They settle on a place "with a view of Manhattan" on Roosevelt Island, in a buidling which you'd totally picture as being in a thriller movie. It's all they can afford, though, so in they go. There's a lot of subterfuge in the plot with how the upstairs apartment gets flooded and leaks down into Connelly's apartment, and there are good subplots with Connelly's troubled childhood, and the way the daughter is hearing voices. Midway, even two-thirds of the way through the movie you're wondering what the big scene is going to be, and how it's going to be resolved.

Which is why it's ultimately disappointing when the climactic scene actually takes place. The problem is, it's not like it's a bad plot twist. Not exactly. The problem is that the bulk of the movie has led you to believe that Connelly's character would never do what she ends up doing. And so when she does it without really seeming to think twice about it, it just doesn't seem quite believable. And so you leave the theater with a sort of... "Oh."... feeling.

The bottom line is that Dark Water was really sort of all right. Personally, I wish they'd taken that great performance from Connelly and made it into a great movie. That said, it's not worth berating with a ton of Trents, either. Let's call it two-point-five.

-- 7/26/05