Lifeguard

Given direction that tends toward the same stolid beefiness as Sam Elliott's over-the-hill-at-thirty lifeguard, this still manages to perform an interesting autopsy on the psyche of the American male. The sub- (and not so sub-) text is homosexual. Heterosexual relationships, infinitely demanding and fraught with chauvinism, pale by comparison with the romantic glow of the male/male encounters; and it's every bit as haunted by the spectral fear of ageing as Death in Venice. A film that can narrow choices down to making a million as a car salesman, or drifting with alternate complacency and anxiety into middle-age as a superannuated beach bum, has something going for it in the way of cumulative obsessiveness.