Cars don't rust in the South the way they do in the North. Northern winters with their road salt take a toll on auto bodies such that it's common to see steel corroded through and flaking away at the edges. And most Northern states enforce inspection laws that make it hard to keep vehicles in legal operation once they start to fall apart.

Not so the South, where the combination of milder climate and looser regulation gives a considerably longer lease on roadworthiness. Cars pass from owner to owner, year to year, held together with whatever's handy for as long as the motor runs. Like, e.g., the Oldsmobile Cutlass that Dermot Mulroney drives in “Undertow.” Parked in the driveway of the ramshackle wood house where Mulroney's character, John Munn, lives with his two sons, the station wagon looks like it might as well be up on blocks. Faded to a bile yellow where isn't retouched with primer, the lunkish contraption gives no obvious sign of operability. But the thing runs – and as the film progresses, it even comes to exude menace.

The Cutlass is an identifiable touch of the director, David Gordon Green, an Arkansas native whose first three films have all been set in a

distinct and unkempt version of the modern South. The publicity material for “Undertow” says it takes place in “a contemporary South untouched by time,” but that's not really true. There's nothing anachronistic about Green's South. All three of his films -- “George Washington” in 2000, “All the Real Girls” in 2002 and “Undertow” last year – are unguardedly modern, they just present unfamiliar faces of modernity.

The places they inhabit are not cities full of cell phones or trimmed suburbs or office parks, but neither is much of early 21st-century America. The moldering factory towns and overgrown but not unpolluted countryside Green invokes are not from some land out of time. His low-budget movies are shot on location, in places stumbled on during scouting trips on Southern highways. They are part of who we are now, not just relics of who we were. They seem fantastical or ancient only because so many movies and TV shows show us such selective glimpses of the country.

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