Green Waters (Mariano De Rosa, 2009): Argentina

Reviewed by Mathew Roscoe, at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

The “family road-trip” subgenre has become one of the most painfully cliché and consistently awful kinds of movies in Hollywood. It started with the classic “National Lampoon’s Vacation”. But during the course of the next thirty years, it was followed with its three sub par sequels,  “Johnson Family Vacation”, “Are We There Yet”, the Razzie-winning “RV”, and God knows how many others. They all had at least one of the exhausted character archetypes: The stern and often-overweight father, the elegant or nagging mother, the rebellious bombshell teenage daughter, and the awkward preteen son. When I learned of Green Waters, I was very curious to see if this foreign take on the story could break free of all the terrible clichés of this Hollywood pattern. Upon seeing it, I do feel that this movie is indeed better than almost all of the other cookie-cutter American products, especially with its surprising focus on drama as opposed to cheap comedy, but it fell short of completely breaking the cycle and becoming something special.

The story, as I’m sure you have guessed by now, is about a family going on vacation. As I had feared, all of the archetypes are there. The stern, protective father and the calm, collected mother are parents of a freshly blossomed teenager daughter and an awkward, overweight preteen son. The movie primarily focuses on the father’s incessant jealousy and suspicion as his daughter plays with other teenagers in a very revealing swimsuit, and his jealousy intensifies as she befriends a handsome, older man who keeps running into them at their various vacation stops. For the rest of the movie, his jealousy steadily grows into hatred of this traveling man who enchants his family with his adventurous personality. During this movie there is also an odd subplot involving the son getting into trouble for running nude on the beach, but that ends almost as soon as it begins and never goes anywhere.

The plot summary was brief because that is pretty much all there is to the movie. One of the movie’s main flaws is that there just isn’t enough to it. That being said, what there is is done well. The movie’s cast is impressive and consistently convincing. The father in particular creates a layered patriarch who, in spite of his irrational and eventually violent jealousy, does so with nothing but his family’s best interest in mind, so even as we may come to dislike him for his actions, his belief that it’s for their own good makes the actions understandable and real, even when it becomes wrong or unforgivable. The father’s emotions are often pinpointed and magnified by some excellent musical cues, such as a low chord being struck when the father’s eyes widen upon hearing that this man his daughter is smitten with is coming to their barbeque. It is here where the movie shows promise of going beyond the conventions and creating a stirring drama, but the escalation weakens near the end and the story never really reaches its peak. There just isn’t enough that happens. The dissatisfaction hits the hardest at the film’s ending. Like far too many other films at the festival, the movie just lacks a strong conclusion, with a lack of resolution.

In the end, Green Waters feels like a rough draft of what could have been a much stronger film. What is there is good enough, but the movie is really missing something and turns out to be unremarkable. Close, but no cigar.