Terence Davies' The Deep Blue Sea is a gouache of a film, with a watery visual pallette more powerful than its performances, which often bloat and sag. An adapatation of Terence Rattigan's 1952 play, it follows Rachel Weisz' Hester, a melancholy judge's wife whose suicide attempt frames the film (Mr Clarkson will be pleased to hear she does it in the privacy of her own flat, well away from the Circle Line). Her attempt is unsuccessful, almost pathetically so, and the film goes on to colour in the act's motives and its immediate aftermath.
The two men in her life are diametric opposites. Hester's husband Sir William (Simon Russell Beale) is well-meaning and dull, a titan of his profession but an emotional titmouse, although, like Chekhov's Dr Dymov, his solidity is an increasingly reassuring lighthouse in a sea of troubles. The third in the triangle is Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), a roistering young Battle of Britain-survivor whose ale-swilling, golfclub-swirling insouciance doesn't hide the boyish temper and war-addled self-caricaturing.
This is Terence Davies' first fictional film since The House of Mirth (2000) and, regrettably, it already feels dated. Obviously it's a period piece and Tom Hiddleston's affected terms of endearment ('old fruit' etc) are excusable as a society-prescribed mask for a deeper void (just as the way the Made in Chelsea lot talk to each other will feel horribly of-its-time in fifty years). But the scenes between Hiddleston and Weisz, two eminently subtle actors, feel too stagey, even for a relationship which is self-consciously melodramatic, and there's far too much shouting, to the point that it often becomes comical (on one occasion in a gallery, this is intentional - "Where are you going?" "TO THE IMPRESSIONISTS!")
Simon Russell Beale, on the other hand, is a marvel. The boring cuckold is never an easy part to play, and even less easy to make sympathetic (my own portrayal of The Husband in the Trinity Players' 2007 production of Lorca's Blood Wedding is a particular nadir), but Russell Beale is somehow simultaneously sweet, tragic, irritating, emasculated, dignified and overly mothered. Ironically, the only scene with all three actors is a mismatch between Hiddleston's shouty faux-menace and Russell Beale's heartbreaking stoicism. This is such a shame, as I love Tom Hiddleston and he is so good in Joanna Hogg's two films, and he's not even bad in this. But there's neither the dangerous swagger nor the tortured vulnerability he displays in Unrelated and Archipelago respectively, and he could have done considerably more here by doing less. Rachel Weisz, who I think is in every scene, is fine, but it is difficult to pity her character (apart from a superb showdown with her mother-in-law) when she has such confused notions of love and tries to kill herself because her birthday was forgotten (compared to heroic landlady Mrs Elton, for whom love is "wiping someone's arse and changing the sheets when they wet the bed").
The film looks beautiful, like all Davies' work. It is sometimes a little too stately for its own good and the pacing is slow, often to the point of stagnation (Hester and Freddie feeling sorry for themselves; all that bloody singing in the pub). But at other points, it is mesmerising (the first time we see Freddie, for instance). The finest scene in the whole film, a long-take flashback sequence to Aldwych tube station during an air raid, is vintage Davies, the Davies of Distant Voices, Still Lives, and a two-minute sonata to the spirit of the Blitz: it made me cry, but it also made me sad that it was like a scene from the film The Deep Blue Sea could have been, one with a present tense. Instead, it is, to borrow Hemingway's critique of the
This is a fickle, frustrating film, one that has pools of greatness but ultimately drowns in its own plodding earnestness. It is surprising that the marriage of these two Terence's, both poets of the repressed, isn't more harmonious.
No comments:
Post a Comment