As “The Deep Blue Sea” opens, it shows the subtitle “London” basking in a glistening lamp light glow as oboe and strings seem to weep over the top of it. The movie fades in and out on a lonely woman as though it were dozing to the sound of the hissing furnace. Based on a play by Terence Rattigan, “The Deep Blue Sea” is about a woman who loves too deeply. And by the look of even the film’s overly maudlin and melodramatic opening, Terence Davies’s movie must be too in love with itself too.
In “around 1950” London, Hester (Rachel Weisz) is living a stuffy, unhappy marriage with an older British judge, Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale), when she starts an affair with a young, chipper air force pilot, Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston).
It would be impossible not to love Freddie based on how Britishy and “smashing” he is at all times, but it seems as if the two are drawn to each other based on the movie’s musical intensity or their own effervescent glow they seem to emanate from the screen. They are so in love that we see an aerial shot of their pale, naked bodies bathed in soft blue light interlocking and spiraling in an ungainly dreamlike reverie.
Hester begins living with Freddie after a troubling visit to William’s mother’s house. William’s mother is, to put it nicely, a catty bitch who hates Hester and scoffs in a dry, hoity toity way that Hester should replace her “passion” with simply “guarded enthusiasm.”
After a few months together, Hester tries to commit suicide when Freddie forgets her birthday. She says the problem for her extreme behavior is that she loves too much and knows he can never love her the same. Her real problem is that although he has nothing to offer her personally or financially, she seems to love unconditionally without reason or specifics, and it causes her to act irrationally.
The two get into a shouting match at an art museum over little more than a dumb joke, and the movie spends the rest of the time in lonely one-shots and pallid lighting to make Hester look plain insane. You’d like them to deal with their problems in a more civil, timely way, to sleep on it at least, but these people can’t even look at each other without feeling emotionally damaged.
“The Deep Blue Sea” indulges in these overwrought emotions. Its monumental theatricality is all glossy polish and no natural finesse or realism. One critic described it as a visual tone poem, but this tone is erratic. One minute Hester is plain giddy and the next moment she’s a ghost, as if the world has ended around her.
Weisz can turn on and off the intensity and emptiness like a light switch, making her a long shot contender for an Oscar, but she renders Hester a moody, over the top romantic without a shred of the womanly intuition that her landlady Mrs. Elton demonstrates in one late scene.
“The Deep Blue Sea” tries to be lovely, but it’s love is lofty and extreme, a love most normal people don’t want anything to do with.
1 ½ stars
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