The Deep Blue Sea (2011) Reviews

• Wonderful for the right audience

  howardeisman2012-03-27

  i saw this with twenty something people. This was not a movie for them, but it is a most superior film for older people who have seen people live torturous lives. Why people do things that hurt themselves is a intriguing question which fascinates psychologists and artists alike. No one has come up with a satisfactory answer, not even a plausible one, and Freud leads the list of the clueless. Thus, Hester (played by a wonderful Rachel Weisz) can fascinate those of us who care about the inner working and emotional vicissitudes of a self destructive woman and who will learn about the human condition by considering her behavior. Simon Beale and Tom Hiddleston, the men in her life, are equally impressive performers playing equally limited (Beale) and troubled (Hiddleston) persons. First, I think most people don't know where the title comes from. A song popular during the second world war (a recent event in this film), has the line "we're caught between perdition and the deep blue sea." This is an apt description of the three protagonists. This film might be quite tedious for those in a hurry to move on with their lives. The three main characters are stuck and seem to have no capacity for getting unstuck. This is tough to contemplate if you can't wait for your tomorrow's great triumph, or if you see romance as a smooth road to your personal paradise. The rest of us are mesmerized as these troubled lives unfold on screen. Yes, the mood and physical atmosphere are almost relentlessly dark (it needn't have been); The film is completely without humor, and it is much too slow moving. These are minor difficulties. The script and performances are magnificent.

• A dark film kept alive by Rachel Weisz's sublime acting

  groenewaldjas2012-03-12

  The main flaw with this film is the score. The entire score seems wholly misplaced against the backdrop of the story. The entire collection of violins drown the dialogue and plot in trills and crescendos, without any consequence, and leaves a bitter taste, from the start, and little hope that something impressive is going to unfold. Having said that, Rachel Weisz as Hester Collyer was sublime. Her portray was forceful, promising and deeply crafted. Her rough emotional distance and tentative passion lends a more natural edge to an other gloomy film. It is tragic when a film, with as much potential as this one, relies so heavily on one of two characters to keep it afloat. The rest of the cast, do not deserve any special mention. They are merely stilted orbs, lacking any remarkable features, revolving around the maelstrom that is Hester Collyer. The cinematography also deserved a special note. Intimate shots swathed in 1950's British charm holds this film in a state of timelessness. The cinematography also mixes well with Rachel Weisz's role - her melancholia so closely studied by Terence Davies, that rushes in and ebbs as quickly, is deepened and darkened by the lifeless rooms and hopeless situations she finds herself in. Overall this is a movie that one needs to see for oneself; in order to formulate your own opinion about it, independently and isolation.

• A lovely, unique, masterful film

  Anscombe2012-01-01

  The credits are rolling; a clock is ticking; a woman's voice is heard, upper-middle class, declaring that, this time, she really is going to die. And so the music begins—the second movement of Samuel Barber's richly romantic violin concerto. The camera pans left and tracks backwards from a dark, difficult-to-make-out street scene. Then, slowly, magically, it begins to glide up, up, up the façade of an utterly typical London terrace house, as the music continues to swell. Finally, as the music reaches its first crescendo, and the camera comes to a halt, we see the haunted face of Rachel Weisz at the top window. And then we dissolve into the past: a man (Simon Russell Beale—Lord William Collyer), and a woman (Rachel Weisz—Hester, his wife) sit opposite each other, in silence. He smiles, gently; she returns his smile. The music is uncertain, fragile. The violins are poised as if in anticipation. Her eyes are starting to fill. And then the haunting melody begins—and just as it begins the tears start to fall down her face. If there has been a more perfect union of music and image in the history of cinema, I have never seen it. The simplicity and beauty of the moment is quite breathtaking. We see further scenes, culminating in a quite remarkably tender and intimate love scene (which features the really quite glorious spectacle of a liberated and libidinous Hester licking Freddie's back). The camera circles; the effect is at once romantic and vaguely sickening. The music draws to a close. Hester is on the floor—is she dead? Voices are heard, distorted, almost ghost-like. And then—SLAP! Hester is violently jolted back to the reality she now has to face. So ends the overture to Terence Davies's latest film, an adaptation of Terrence Rattigan's play "The Deep Blue Sea". It is a glorious, singular opening, which matches practically nothing in cinema, and certainly nothing in Rattigan. His play takes place in one room on one day. Davies shatters these classical unities into shards of memory, which the viewer must piece together into new wholes—just as Hester must go in search of her lost time, to gain some sort of control over her own troubled consciousness. How did she get here? Why did she try to commit suicide? *Did* she try to commit suicide? Is it because her lover no longer loves her? Is her primary motivation love, or shame, or something else? A series of flashbacks provide us with clues, but of course no answers. Davies is not only a master at relating music and image—his opening overture is perhaps the best opening to a film I've ever seen. He is also wonderfully alive to the deep indeterminacy of human motive, a theme which he left relatively unexplored in his early autobiographical memory pieces, but which seems increasingly to be the red thread uniting his later adaptations. Of course, we are not simply a mystery to ourselves. But aspects of our mental lives will remain forever dark to us. And, because we are inside Hester's consciousness throughout, we see that, although her behaviour is hardly inexplicable, aspects of her mental life will remain forever dark to her as well. We *see*—centrally, we see how Hester feels; but we do not always feel how Hester feels. At the end of the film's brilliantly acted closing scene, she is heartbroken. We can see this; but what I felt is a kind of relief, at Hester's becoming freed from an impossible, stifling situation. I think this is deliberate. Barber's music is gushingly romantic, and it could easily be used, by a lesser director, to create cheap emotional effects. But this is not how Davies uses it. It is the music of her love affair with Freddie. And the film is not—in its "real time" sequences—about her love affair with Freddie. It's about the end of the affair. That is why we hear the music during the overture—which is about her affair—but hardly at all during the rest of the film. The romance in the music is a kind of lie. That is what Hester must come to terms with. The snatches of music we hear later are the final flickering of a dying ember, reminding Hester of what she (and we) must move beyond. Barber's romanticism gives way to something more prosaic, less elevated, and more world-weary: Eddie Fisher singing "Any Time". This is a film of real riches. The shot composition alone makes it something to treasure. It's also a vast improvement on Rattigan's somewhat unfocused play, which Davies adapts, not as Rattigan himself did in the earlier film version, by trying to "open it out" (by including scenes of Freddie and Hester on a skiing holiday—rather as 1970s British sitcoms were "opened out" for their film versions by sending the cast away on holiday), but by homing in on its central relationships, and breaking it up in the way I have described. I am not sure it is a flawless film. Collyer's mother (Barbara Jefford) seems to be too much of a caricature to perform the function which Davies seems to intend for her—to represent one manifestation of the repressive social values which Hester is up against. But this remains a film of deep intelligence and real grace—qualities which its central performances also possess. And here special mention must be made of Rachel Weisz, who gives a really wonderful, sympathetic, and utterly authentic performance. Authenticity permeates the film as a whole. This is not a smirking, ironic vision of the 1950s, intended primarily to comfort us on how far we've come; it *is* the 1950s, as Davies remembers it, with all its starchiness and stiffness—and that is likely to be somewhat challenging and somewhat alienating for the modern viewer. But audiences who are prepared to meet that challenge will be richly rewarded by this lovely, unique, masterful film.

• The End of the Affair

  Rave-Reviewer2011-12-16

  A story we have seen many times before - woman destroyed by love - but one with which the director of The House of Mirth both has a particular affinity and invests with that dreamlike, almost somnambulist, melancholy and clear-eyed, even-handed candour in his representations of the key players: desperate romantic wife, wronged but dignified husband, selfish but droll lover, stern yet empathetic landlady. As a result the familiar turns of the narrative matter less than the exquisitely observed pathos of their enaction. Davies messes with chronology, too, so that we begin at story's end and are never sure how close together the two suicide attempts come. The final shot is a chilling pan onto a burnt-out shell of a house, at once proleptic and symbolic of the protagonist's utter desolation, like something from a David Lynch movie.

• 98 minutes I will never get back.

  bodinehist2012-05-14

  I entered this film with high expectations and was sorely disappointed, and for someone who usually enjoys period films with strong character development, that's saying something. Everything I needed to know about the character(s) was revealed in the slow spiraling first ten minutes of the movie during which I was already looking at my watch and waiting for the pace of the film to pick up. It never did. Here is the story: bored, well-to-do housewife, has left boring, and sadly loyal husband with a difficult mother for shallow, self-consumed air force pilot only to find that the relationship doesn't work. We don't know exactly why. He is certainly damaged by the war and hates his current mundane life, and it's hinted that he's not smart enough for her, though for some inconceivable reason she can't seem to break her infatuation with him. She hates her life and herself, so rather than spending it sitting in a dark flat staring at the walls and hoping for lung cancer to set in, she decides to kill herself. This is where the audience comes into the film. Unfortunately for the us, she fails, so we are forced to endure watching the remaining 90 minutes of the film in small, yet amazingly interminable snippets of her life, any of which, if developed at all, had the potential to be interesting. By the last 20 minutes, it was a toss up which of us, her or me, would survive to see the light of day.