Up-and-comer tells tales of disaffected youth with grace

TORONTO, Ont. -- This kid David Gordon Green is 29 years old, and he is a great filmmaker. He walked onto the stage at the Toronto Film Festival wearing jeans, a T-shirt and flip-flops, and said he'd gotten worked up over the premiere of his new film and stubbed his little toe on his coffee table and broken it. "It's twice the size it was an hour ago," he said morosely, peering down at the injured digit. And then he showed us "Undertow," and this film is a masterpiece.

Green has his own voice, his own tone, his own world. He tells stories of wandering and disaffected young people -- not rebels, not outcasts, just somehow lost -- who live in an American South of empty fields and marginal homes and rusted-out remnants of bankrupt manufacturing enterprises. They yearn to love and belong, spend moments of peace and gentleness, live in a world where terrible things can happen. He photographs them with the attention of an artist. He gives them things to say that you have never heard anyone say before, and yet it always sounds as if they would say them.

His first film, "George Washington," made in 2001, was an astonishing debut in which a young character dies and his death is concealed and no one is really to blame and a great sadness grows. Then at Sundance 2003 came "All the Real Girls" (2003), about a boy who has made meaningless love to many girls but now meets a girl he really loves, and hesitates to touch her because it would reduce her to being like all of the others. Those films had a distinctive, assured voice, unlike any I had heard before; they were unique in story and style while still somehow seeming familiar, as if their world was not new but simply forgotten.

Now here is "Undertow," about two boys being raised in a rural district by their father, who mourns the death of his wife. The older boy gets in trouble, runs a nail through his foot, loves his little brother. One day their father's brother turns up fresh from prison, and moves in. He is not a nice man. He wants the gold coins left by the boys' grandfather. His greed leads to death and danger, and an odyssey by the two boys across the worn-out local landscape. They meet homeless kids their age, get close to trouble but not in it, build a shelter in a junkyard. All the time the younger brother eats strange things and they make him sick.

I pause in frustration at such a bald plot outline. Nothing I have written can convey the poetry and beauty of the film. The plot never really engages as it would in a traditional film; it's more like a surface the characters can skate over on their way to growing up. Green said he was inspired by the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the adventure stories of Poe, Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, and modern crime stories like In Cold Blood. That seems like an unlikely list, until you see the film and realize it really does contain all of those inspirations. And lives up to them, too.