Just a Mom Cleaning Up After the Kids

Actress Tilda Swinton made an extraordinary sight at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Standing in the snow outside one of the venues, she was dressed in an ankle-length Technicolor coat and rimless orange glasses, her green eyes and pale face framed by a head of copper hair. She looked like some exotic bird. She made all of the black-clad acquisitions people and agents look monochromatic, drone-like.

Swinton sightings are rare in these parts. She lives on a mountain in the north of Scotland and makes arty European films that during the past 15 years have earned her a cult following and 14,000 pages on the Web (many of them linked to porn, which she finds “interesting,” though not interesting enough to look at). Her elusiveness has something to do with her taste, which is way underground, and with her working methods, which are more conducive to small movies.

“I’m actually a very lazy person,” she says, perched on a chair in a hotel suite during the festival. “I get bored really easily. I have to remain curious, and that means being in a dialogue with the people you’re working with. I can’t think of anything more boring than being given a task to achieve and then go home. It’s just not what I’m in it for. And I’ve been very fortunate in continually meeting filmmakers who are in it for the same reason.”

Swinton worked with two such filmmakers, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, on “The Deep End,” which premiered at Sundance and will be released in Los Angeles on Wednesday. The film, based on a book by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding called “The Blank Wall” (which was previously adapted by Max Ophuls in his 1949 film “The Reckless Moment”), is about a Margaret, a mother of three, whose teenage son (Jonathan Tucker) accidentally kills his sleazy older gay lover (Josh Lucas).

Her attempts to cover up the murder are complicated when a pair of gangster types (one of them played by “ER’s” Goran Visnjic) blackmail her with a video that ties her son to his lover. But that’s not the end of it. Visnjic’s character has a change of heart, at first feeling ashamed of himself and then feeling a good deal more, although Swinton is far too busy with her refrigerator magnets to reciprocate. In fact, much of the tension in the film comes from the fact that Margaret has to juggle Visnjic’s threats, and then the menace posed by his far more hardhearted partner, with her son’s trumpet lessons, her daughter’s ballet classes, her carpooling commitments and her father-in-law’s addled nattering about his socks.

All of this is played out against a backdrop of suburban splendor on the shores of Lake Tahoe. Trouble in paradise. But then, to Swinton’s way of thinking, there’s always trouble in paradise.

“In a way, the simplest and most banal statement you can make about the story is it’s a mess, she’s a mother, she cleans it up,” Swinton says dryly. “And that’s what mothers do.”

Swinton, 40, speaks with authority on the subject, being a mother of 3-year-old twins (the father is artist John Byrne).

“Tilda really liked the idea that there was something almost perfunctory about the way she goes about trying to solve the problem,” Siegel says. “That ‘I’m hiding the body and doing the laundry’ was really appealing to her because I think it speaks about the process of life that Tilda is able to identify with.”

Notes Swinton, “Women really do lift cars off their children.” And in “The Deep End” Margaret piles the soggy corpse of her son’s lover into a dinghy and dumps it in Lake Tahoe.

“To a certain extent, we’re dealing with a murder and a body and blackmail, but actually it’s a mother’s day. And it’s just as important that she gets the laundry,” Swinton adds. ‘There’s a beautiful little moment when he [the blackmailer] says to her, ‘I’ll meet you outside the post office at 5 o’clock and remember the $50,000’ and she [replies] ‘Four o’clock, because I have kids.’ That’s where her attention goes immediately.”

Swinton loves such small moments because she is not a showy actress. She feels that “too much effort, especially in front of the camera, is toxic,” and so her characters often have an astringent quality, which is not quite the same as reserved. The emotions are just below the surface, not sealed away somewhere, although sometimes they can be hard to read.

She can be opaque, enigmatic, nowhere more so than in her most famous turn, as the androgynous Orlando in the 1993 film of the same name. There she morphed from a man to a woman over the course of several centuries. It’s unsettling, to say the least, to see sexuality so fungible, accomplished with attitude rather than with props.

In fact, one of the things about Swinton that appealed to directors McGehee and Siegel is that she does so much with so little. Much of her “Deep End” performance is shot in close-up. She is both actor and reactor. Her only concern was that she could convincingly behave as a suburban American housewife. She communicated this concern and others to McGehee and Siegel with a month of e-mails from Scotland.

“I sometimes do honestly believe that the cinema has gone downhill since people started talking,” she says. “Certainly a lot of film performance has gone down since then because people had to say things in different ways. I made a lot of silent films with Derek Jarman when we were working in Super 8, of course because there was no sound. I have a taste for it.”

Swinton, who is Scottish and was educated at Cambridge University and performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company, had a long, fruitful collaboration with Jarman (in “Caravaggio,” “The Last of England,” “War Requiem,” “The Garden” and “Edward II”), making films that were transgressive, esoteric, weird and idea-heavy.

Her one big studio movie to date was last year’s critically derided “The Beach,” in which she played a frighteningly controlling earth mother to a band of Gen Xers (including Leonardo DiCaprio) on an unspoiled Thai island.

Despite the naysayers, she thinks that the film “achieved its objective” and complains that it was marketed improperly, as a “benign ‘Blue Lagoon,’ rather than what it was, the Nintendo generation’s answer to ‘Lord of the Flies.”’

Swinton followed that with Tim Roth’s little-seen but haunting “War Zone,” in which her teenage daughter is sexually abused by her husband while Swinton’s character is pregnant. Swinton had just delivered her twins, so viewers saw a woman genuinely swollen rather than prosthetically enhanced. And we’re not talking about glamorously engorged, like Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair.

“My contribution to the film was entirely my attachment to the idea of documenting that state, because I had never seen it [on film],” Swinton says.

“You have babies and this is what you look like and everybody who has had a baby knows it. Why do we continually see films commissioned by, maybe produced by, maybe even directed by and played by women who know better [than pregnancy being] sitting in hospital in a fluffy nightgown? It’s just a lie.”

It was Swinton’s performance in “War Zone” that helped convince McGehee and Siegel that she would be right for the role of Margaret, because, as McGehee puts it, “Tilda’s screen persona can be fairly ethereal and otherworldly and exotic, and there was something about [‘The War Zone’] that persuaded us that she could really do anything.

That “something” is a surprisingly warm, maternal quality. Of course, the flip side of this is a fierce protectiveness. In “The War Zone,” it’s demonstrated when she explodes after finding out what her husband has been doing. In real life, it comes out when she’s asked what sex her twins are: “They are all variety of sexes,” she says evasively. “They have the full range.”

Perhaps it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that beneath the Technicolor coat and orange glasses there beats the heart of a soccer mom.