There are so few filmmakers willing to tackle the romantic melodrama these days that Terence Davies?s The Deep Blue Sea is welcome just for its sheer novelty. An adaptation of Terence Rattigan?s 1952 play, the picture opens with an attempted suicide and ends with an uneasy kind of redemption. It?s a love story with a great deal of furious, elegant handwriting packed between the lines, an exploration of immutable class distinctions and emotional and sexual repression in postwar England. And Rachel Weisz, as a woman who risks everything for the love of the wrong man, carries the mood and subtext of the material safely tucked in her dressing-gown pocket ? she?s vulnerable and self-motivated in all the right measures.
But there?s such a thing as having too much reverence for your material, and although Davies is an extraordinarily gifted and principled director, The Deep Blue Sea may suffer for that reverence. Weisz plays Hester Collyer, the wife of an esteemed judge, Sir William (Simon Russell Beale). Her life is clearly comfortable, though not altogether happy, which is made clear by a scene in which her mother-in-law (played by Barbara Jefford) excoriates her for even believing in the notion of passion. And when we first see her, she?s a person who no longer wishes to live, a limp, drained figure in a murky, crowded bedroom: That?s the drab flat she shares with Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston, of War Horse, not to mention that he also plays Loki in Thor and the upcoming Avengers), the shallow if occasionally charming former RAF pilot who drew her away from her husband like a magnet. The story of how and why Hester made the choices she did is told in flashback, but her present ? a present that, in the days when it…
Connie Nielsen Cristina Dumitru Daisy Fuentes Dania Ramirez Danica Patrick Daniella Alonso Danneel Harris Deanna Russo
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