By Will Ross
This 1952 stageplay crosses over to the reel for a second time, but with little interpretation on the filmmaker’s end
As do many plays on their way to the screen, The Deep Blue Sea would have worked better with a shake-up. At a story level, the film owes a debt to its playwright, perhaps to a fault. Even Terence Davies’s world-class direction doesn’t make filmic the talky, gut-spilling nakedness that surely hits harder coming live from flesh and blood on a stage.
Fortunately, with that directorial world-classery behind it, The Deep Blue Sea’s emotional nudity survives diminished, not crippled, but it’s only when Davies takes the material to places only cinema can go that it very nearly becomes a pretty important film.
The plot — insofar as it matters, for this is a story of disclosure, not turning points — concerns a woman in post-war London who cuckolds her loyal and affectionate but passionless husband, and leaves him and his wealth for a veteran pilot with whom she has fallen in desperate love. But no two parties want the same thing, and all three wrestle with the choice between solitary boredom and self-destructive devotion.
Perhaps Davies could have done with a little less devotion to playwright Terence Rattigan’s words, as The Deep Blue Sea feels like a film built around its source instead of into it. Davies’s eye for period visuals is unsurpassed, but too often his flowing, elliptical style feels locked into a lengthy dialogue exchange. When that style does emerge via a scene’s hazy chronology, or an aesthetically imposing shot, the Terence Davies that made Distant Voices, Still Lives comes into clear view, and the film is better for it.
This is not to say that the film is a brilliance-punctuated bore, as the cast makes the talking more than worth it. Rachel Weisz’s work as Hester is absorbingly frank and needy, and Tom Hiddleston projects self-righteousness with verve, and some unfortunate exaggeration. Best of all, Simon Russell Beale takes his cuckold’s noble weaknesses from disrepair to resolve with a grace that gives in his third-place screen time the first-place prize among the performances.
At the head of all this is an opening sequence that is confusing, and disorienting, and handily the best part of the film. The staging, cutting, and sound design of this sequence form a tour-de-force of craftsmanship; indeed, the first ten minutes are astounding enough to earn a price-of-admission-worthy moniker. It’s a bravura reminder of Davies’s true capabilities, but instead of settling for good melodrama, the rest of the film could have been an equally radical rethinking.
