Water, Water Everywhere: A Big Bad Swim in Sam's Lake

It has been said that the the mood at this year's Tribeca Film Festival is a bit on the somber side - no surprise, infused as it is with intense dramas and documentaries tackling bleak subjects like war, genocide and mass destruction. But with such an extensive list of entries, the festival hasn't neglected smaller films that confront neither turbulent political events nor controversial social issues, but instead use compelling actors, clever writing and ingenious filmmaking on miniscule budgets to do what independent movies do best: tell stories that capture ordinary people in entertaining situations.

Ishai Setton's "Big Bad Swim" is one example of the mundane turned intriguing. Set in a Southeastern Connecticut town where Mohegan Sun serves as the social epicenter, the film follows the members of an adults-only beginner swim class as they form bonds while conquering a tenacious childhood fear that, predictably, mirrors the anxieties and insecurities woven into their daily lives. The plot focuses on the burgeoning friendship between Amy (Paget Brewster) and Jordan (Jess Weixler) the two most beautiful women in the class (funny how it always works that way in movies) both desperate for genuine female connections. Brewster stands out as a neurotic thirty-something calculus teacher embroiled in a nasty split with her husband, a fellow teacher at her high school. Her struggle to process the pain and humiliation of a failed marriage, aggravated by open taunts from her students and the principal's insistence that she resign from her job, is sidelined as she delves deeper, eventually realizing that the neat, tidy existence she's crafted for herself is in fact a hollow void. She clings to Jordan, whose youthful life as a Blackjack dealer and part-time stripper seems edgy and glamorous by comparison. Noah (Jeff Branson), the stoic and generically gorgeous swim teacher who was once an Olympic-caliber diver before an injury, also takes a liking to Jordan as he struggles to yank himself from a cycle of medicated depression while wearing a shirt as infrequently as possible.

Amy and Jordan's attachment hits a pothole when the former casually offers to set the latter up with a hostessing job, the implication being that Jordan's stripping must be stopped. While Amy's passive aggression is subtle enough to be believable, Jordan's violent reaction and their subsequent falling out seems false, in part because her decision to strip as a whole makes little sense. At times you can almost visualize the film's writer flipping through his official screenplay guide to locate the trusty rule: "When unsure of what to do with a hot female character, make her a stripper. At minimum, doing so will provide instant storylines and openings for conflict with the male love interest, not to mention ample opportunities to show the young woman naked."

The problem in "Big Bad Swim" is that the stripper golden rule falls short, paralyzing a promising female character in the process. Jordan is intelligent, independent and openly conflicted about her second job. Setton, as male filmmakers are wont to do, glamorizes her stripping, incorrectly assuming that a woman who chooses to strip for money necessarily broods over its exploitation of her body yet still self-identifies with the profession enough to nearly end a friendship over it. In the course of my wanderings I've met three or four strippers who roughly fit Jordan's profile (early twenties, beautiful, blonde, intelligent), and after a few drinks shamelessly grilled them about their jobs. They were happy to admit that they did it almost as a lark, a temporary party-filled gig offering a substantial income coated with free-flowing champagne and undivided male attention. Call it debauched or shallow if you wish, but who are most women, or men for that matter, to judge? Jordan's reasons for stripping are never fully evident, and certainly don't outweigh her trepidations about it. Her employer is a sleazy, low volume joint, hardly the kind of place that would net more money than hostessing, while her modest lifestyle (she lives at home with her parents) and less grueling full-time job all beg the question, why have two jobs in the first place?

The other class members, while equally potent characters, serve as afterthoughts visited at irregular intervals throughout the film. There's a boisterous married couple with fidelity problems, learning to swim because they "just put in a new pool" behind their benchmark suburban house, and a tiny, fiercely competitive Asian girl who dubs Amy and Jordan the "cool kids" in the class. Most compelling is the indomitably masculine police officer who decomposes into a quivering mass at the sight of water, but is determined to swim as a promise to his son. Jordan's teenage brother (Avi Setton) and his grating friend (Ricky Ullman) form a superfluous side plot that offers no real insight and detracts from the film's overall authenticity. Ultimately, while the plot gauzes at times, you're drawn so effectively into the main characters that you don't really care. The film, like its subjects, is at its best in the pool, a tranquil alternate reality providing a space to recognize beauty and overcome hidden demons, bringing home the message that the fears and insecurities driving our lives have likely changed very little since we hatched them as children.

"Sam's Lake," a boiler plate horror film with an inventive and original twist, presents no prescient topic or overarching moral question heavier than "Why the hell do people in scary movies always decide to snoop around the excessively creepy deserted house in the middle of the night?" Shot in a mere eighteen days in the woods bordering Toronto, Andrew C. Erin's film delivers all the campy thrills so expensively (and often falsely) promised by large studio productions, including high speed chases through dark forests, screaming victims, gory sound effects and believably formidable psychopaths. Granted, you have to make it through the plodding setup, forty minutes of trite dialogue and banal editing tricks that could have been lifted from a dozen horror flicks, before the actual fun starts. But once it arrives, you can forget any eye-rolling and simply enjoy.

The plot initially unfurls like a film school horror checklist. On the one-year anniversary of her father's untimely death, the beautiful young Sam (Fay Masterson) invites four of her equally young, equally attractive friends to spend a weekend at her family's remote cabin, tucked away on the mysterious Sam's Lake. Little do they know that a madman is rumored to lurk in the surrounding woods, snatching away unsuspecting residents and leaving in their places stick-figure cornhusk dolls that he could have learned to make during an arts and crafts seminar taught by the Blair Witch. Erin delivers every facet of the standard formula with great pain, down to the eerie backwoods town, the "Deliverance"-esque shopkeeper who warns the dubious city-dwellers that "these parts ain't safe this time of year," and carefully edited shots of the unwashed killer darting through patches of spooky trees. The group arrives at Sam's cabin, more disintegrating shanty than rustic weekend getaway, and eventually discovers that something is amiss, while the audience starts to pass the time predicting which of them will die, in what order and by what grisly method.

When it arrives, the plot twist hits so rapidly that cries of "Wait, what's happening?" rose from my neighbors in the theater. Thanks to adept editing and believable acting, the scene works, effectively transforming the film into a fast-paced thriller peppered with the requisite dying gurgles and bloody gushes. It's not subtle or particularly profound, but it is fun, and after a few hours of rehashing Jonestown and suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge, I'd say we're all entitled to a little light enjoyment.