Deep Blue Sea
- Year:2011
- Rating:M
- Director:Terence Davies
- Cast:Tom Hiddleston, Rachel Weisz
- Release Date:April 12, 2012
- Distributor:Transmission
- Running time:99 minutes
- Film Worth:$17.00
- FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Boasting a first-rate screenplay and cast, and a wonderfully nostalgic atmosphere, this sometimes veers toward melodrama but always rings true.
We're told at the beginning of The Deep Blue Sea that it's set in London "around 1950." There's something very apt about the vagueness, because it's a story which - despite being acute in its sense of time and place - also boasts a feeling of timeless universality. Eternal triangles, broken hearts...this is of course the perennial stuff of tragedy. One character, however, actually specifically rejects the description of tragedy for their problems, shrugging self-deprecatingly that "it's sad, perhaps, but hardly Sophocles." That's the kind of intelligently sardonic wit that you can expect in a film based on a play by Terence Rattigan (The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version).
Rachel Weisz plays Hester Collyer, the wife of Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale), an essentially decent but rather stuffy and pompous judge. Hester falls desperately in love with Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston), a young former RAF pilot for whom The Battle Of Britain was not only his moment of glory, but the happiest time in his life. She moves in with him, but there is considerably more to the saga than that.
This is a rich mix of romantic overstatement and reserve, of the claustrophobically downbeat and the almost melodramatically intense, yet it generally rings true. There's memorable dialogue here, uniformly first-rate acting (best of all by Weisz) and the sort of magically melancholy nostalgia perfected in the TV plays of Dennis Potter. And there's at least one scene that you're guaranteed not to forget. On the (marginal) debit side, Freddie is arguably too puerile and uncontrolled a character for Hester to have had any sort of relationship with. And William is, on the other hand, possibly too much of a stuffed shirt to have attracted her in the first place. But none of this detracts from the film's great emotional and dramatic impact. Highly recommended.
