The lake in question is supposedly in Maine, where two state policemen are investigating rumors of something strange in water. While diving to check out a beaver lodge, one is suddenly attacked, bitten clean in half. A tooth extracted from the body appears to have come from a giant crocodile! Before long, a state Natural Resources official (Bill Pullman), a paleontologist from New York (Bridget Fonda), the surviving cop (Brendan Gleeson), and a rich, croc-obessessed amateur (Oliver Platt) are teamed up to find the reptile. But will they really try to kill it or preserve it as a Miracle of Nature?

Let that plot description stand as a warning for what to expect. Fonda's role is thoroughly underdeveloped and Pullman sleepwalks through the film with his face running on Automatic Smirk. The plot freely rips devices and even whole lines from JAWS but seems more like a Disney version of a '50s monster film with naughty words thrown in. I kept waiting for Buddy Hackett to show up!

The film is full of gaffes and implausabilities, not the least of which is that the lake--supposedly close to the ocean--is in Aroostock County (the top third of Maine), which is nowhere close to the shore! That kind of MST3K badness is fun enough, but the film also offers a high-energy performance by Platt in a role which ought to make any grown actor break down and cry for lack of consistency and motivation, a delightful supporting performance by Betty White as the foul-mouthed widow of a dairy farmer, and--oh, yes--that giant crocodile, which almost measures up as an effect to at least the lesser efforts of Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen. The last scene, which involves the croc, a cow, and a helicopter, defies description!  In this day and age, it's something of a misbegotten pleasure to find a film that fulfills the legacy of "summer movies" by offering an escape from pretense and overhype!

LIMBO is set in Alaska, and the trailers might cause one to expect an edgier version of NORTHERN EXPOSURE, with quirky characters in a vast and still-wild land. But the Alaska of the film is quickly established as a state of limbo, its conditions changed enough so that characters without direction can thrash about and die. The salmon cannery is closing. The tour boats bring senior citizens to listen to romanticized tales of the gold rush days. And local entrenpreneurs confer on how to clear-cut timber without dismaying the tourists and how to make the wilderness itself the newest, biggest theme park.   Non-entrepreneurs are stranded in the town: the cannery worker who keeps trying to get his fishing boat back from the women who bought it; the bush pilot (Kris Kristofferson) looking for an easier way to make a living; and Joe Gastineau, the high schoolbasketball star who lost a scholarship to a bad leg and is coping with other demons from his past.

A decent, quiet and intelligent man, who wears his reserve the way a fisherman might wear a slicker, Joe becomes attracted to Donna, a singer who knows that her career will always be built on gigs at weddings and bars. She has her own tensions with her teenage daughter, Noelle, a beautiful and talented girl who must swim through the hallways of her school like a fish among predators. Noelle resents that her mother has never had a stable relationship with a man and is jealous of her budding love for Joe. As these lives begin to take shape and find direction, though, the conditions change again. Joe's half-brother Bobby (Casey Siemaszko) asks Joe to take him up the coast, and the four find their lives altered so that they must plumb their own depths to find what they are capable of.

Sayles' great strength as a filmmaker has always been in his writing, and LIMBO is one of his most strongly written scripts. The satirical edge of the opening scenes is very funny, and any one of several plot twists or character revelations in LIMBO would be fodder for a complete two-hour TV movie of the week, or even a theatrical film, but the film's complexity of plot and character never seems forced. Rather, it is like discovering new depths in a river whose surface you think you have mapped. Only THE DREAM LIFE OF ANGELS has come as close this year to giving me characters who seem to be real people, living real lives. The plot turns may be unsettling and the ending, which richly reflects the title, is the most unsettling twist of all, but it is thoroughly justified.

LIMBO is easily, for me, one of the year's best films and one of the best of Sayles' career.