The Deep Blue Sea: Review By harveycritic

THE DEEP BLUE SEA

Music Box Films

Reviewed for MovieWeb by Harvey Karten

Grade: B

Director: Terence Davies

Screenwriter: Terence Davies, from Terence Rattigan's play

Cast: Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale, Harry Hadden-Paton, Karl Johnson, Jolyon Coy, Sarah Kants, Barbara Jefford, Nicholas Amer

Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 2/22/12

Opens: March 23, 2012

Money isn't everything. All you need is love. These clichés are put to the test in Terence Davies's drama based on a play written in 1952 by Terence Rattigan. Rattigan and Davies make an ideal pair. Rattigan was considered a middlebrow playwright whose dramas are set in upper middle-class backgrounds directed to the "Aunt Edna" demographic--people with conventional taste. "The Winslow Boy," for example, deals with a father's attempt to clear his son of a charge of stealing a five-shilling postal note. Some believe that Rattigan, who was gay (and would be 100 years old now), wrote "The Deep Blue Sea" as a love story between two males and that he penned it after the suicide of an ex-lover. As for Terence Davies, the sixty-six-year old writer-director believes in understated emotions, like Rattigan whose play he adapts for the screen. Davies's early pictures were shot in black and white to create a beauty more powerful because the stories would be stripped of all superfluity.

While "The Deep Blue Sea" is filmed in color, photographer Florian Hoffmeister opts for dark tones to the probable annoyance of many in the audience who may not agree that a lack of light would accentuate the emotions of the three principals.

Featuring Rachel Weisz in a dazzling performance as a woman who loves too much. "The Deep Blue Sea" occurs during a single day in 1950, though Davies delivers one flashback after another to fill us in on the background of this desperately love-seeking woman who is resuscitated after having tried to kill herself by taking twelve aspirins and turning on the gas. Taking place in 1950 with England still recovering from damage of German bombers during World War 2, the story flashes back ten months when Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz) bolted from the opulent household of Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale--a noted British theater actor), having fallen madly in love with an immature, young Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston). Freddie, who has not adjusted to peacetime and thinks more of his glorious days fighting the Luftwaffe then he does about the new, beautiful woman in his life, has set himself up as a man who will condemn his loved one to a deeply-felt heartbreak. Here is a case of a man who does not love a woman in quite the passionate way that she loves him--rarely a formula for a happy relationship. Nor does Freddie's lack of a job or money lead to an existence more enticing than life in a dilapidated tenement house run by an overly curious landlady.

Amid the long strains of Samuel Barber's plaintive violin concerto though with scant music on the soundtrack during the conversations between Freddie and Hester, life plays out as Freddie, like a modern husband more intent on playing cards or the horses than staying home with his wife, spends much of his time on the golf course or singing in the local bar. Hester's attempted suicide, perhaps seen as a ploy to win back her young man's interest and affection, merely drives him further away until he appears to take away any shred of her dignity by thrusting a shilling at her as he would a hooker.

Melodramatic scenes punctuate the film which has marked time in a quiet way as vicious arguments break out between Freddie and Hester--a contrast from the even keel at which the wealthy Sir William and she have maintained decorum. Some marvelous scenes find Londoners singing current popular songs in the bar, steins of beer in hand, while a terrific tracking shot of the Underground during the early 1940s finds Londoners singing merrily as the bombs go off above.

"The Deep Blue Sea" is a period piece which does not try to deliver a contemporary style--which could put off some moviegoers who look askance at anything not au courant. This movie exists for those who can appreciate a personal story whose principal character demonstrates an astonishing display of heartbreaking emotional suffering.

Rated R. 98 minutes (c) 2012 by Harvey Karten, Member NY Film Critics Online