It seems quite churlish to excuse a novice director's first feature-length outing (especially when you have not yet made one), and since this director, Marfield, was introduced at "Deepwater's" SIFF screening this past June, his direct and humble appearance made it a film you wanted to like. Unfortunately, "Deepwater" is fraught with the flagrant over-eagerness and lack of restraint that can plague younger director's first outings (which is forgivable), as "Deepwater" doesn't so much resemble a movie as a does a really long movie trailer, vigorously painting the lily when you're already working with a pretty narrow flower.<br /><br />Set in an anonymous rural America (though it's swamp setting seems to illuminate that this is either in or nearby southern Louisiana), we first meet it's sort-of hero Nat (Lucas Black) as he's just being released from a mental institution, headed towards Wyoming to become a sheep farmer (or something like that). That night, however, he's involved in a violent barroom brawl with some pinhead regulars, though by the end of the altercation he is able to swipe the keys from one of their swanky new vehicles.<br /><br />After the car dies down on a sheep-infested road, he meets a local hotel owner Finch (Peter Coyote) who's car has just been flipped over, though leaving nary a physical scratch or a speck of dust on his slick, white-bullet of a suit (which precisely sums up his personality). After they have the obligatory introduction, he invites Black to come work on his old, somewhat corroded hotel, for which he seasonally operates as well as doing unexplained "business" with various, shifty-eyed local merchants.<br /><br />Of course, not everything is quite what it initially seems, as Nat begins to realize perhaps something more sinister and deadly in Finch's rather clandestine way of bringing home the bacon. From locals turning up dead, to law enforcements repeated intrusions on Finch's hotel property and large sums of money arriving from an unexplained origin, something is seriously (and perhaps dangerously) awry. And when Coyote's young and lovely new wife Iris (Mia Maestro), initially resistant at first, vigorously seduces Nat and then hatches up a scheme to pilfer Coyote's "reward" money and escape, everything seems to be set. However, Nat unfortunately never realized it's often his own perception that can turn against him.<br /><br />At it's heart, "Deepwater" is a very conventional neo-noir exercise in style, and yet it's so luridly over embellished and so relentlessly over plotted (none of it's excess with any plausible purpose or destination) that it just becomes one ridiculously defiled, incoherent mess. We get (for a brief example) endless fast-forwards and clamorous musical cues, a prolonged and visually peppered-up boxing training sequence that looks like "Rocky" on acid, a zoom in on a man's intestines getting pecked at by vultures; none of it mattering (or bearable) in the slightest. You almost wish they would've told the predictable story of self-delusion in a straight, lucid manner, rather than an all-out assault on our eyes and cerebral digestion. Stale, perhaps, but at least a modestly indulgent distraction.<br /><br />"Deepwater" occasionally shows some visual promise (though the deafening score and hazy rapid-zoom through a supposedly drugged-out forest during the starting credits instantly concludes that this is going to be quite unwatchable), as the moss-green and vibrant navy blue color schemes occasionally create a vivid, believable atmosphere of swampside congestion and fear. And Lesley Ann Warren, as a somber waitress forever confined in small-town despair, hints at a potentially affecting performance if the script ultimately didn't eventually turn her character into a nondescript plot device.<br /><br />Hopefully we can pardon David S. Marfield's first feature as a well-intentioned but completely turgid would-be potboiler, and perhaps if he finds time to relax and cannily craft a film with a decisive identity, he could very well find his own voice in popular modern noir. Until then, "Deepwater" is a serious no-no.