Deep Blue Sea review: Just a shallow romance

By Chris Tookey

Last updated at 8:40 AM on 25th November 2011

The Deep Blue Sea (12a)

Verdict: Too dry and too wet

Rating:

The Deep Blue Sea is an achievement in two areas — it’s well acted and beautiful to look at. But as a drama, director Terence Davies has teamed up with the late playwright Terence Rattigan, and it’s not a match made in heaven. Where Rattigan was glam, Davies is glum.

Previously shot in 1955 with  Vivien Leigh, this is the story of a romantic triangle circa 1950, with a beautiful young wife, Lady Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz), walking out of a sexless marriage with judge Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale).

She shacks up in seedy lodgings with former RAF pilot Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston). Freddie’s a dashing, handsome young chap but nowhere near as much in love with Lady Hester as she is with him.

Damp squib of a love affair: Tom Hiddleston and Rachel Weisz

And therein lies the tragedy: this really isn’t that deep. Despite the emotional hurt on display, there’s not much grandeur. You feel these agonies belong on an agony aunt’s problem page rather than on the big screen.

Davies tries through his camerawork and a couple of musical interludes to link the angst of his characters to the aftermath of wartime destruction, but the parallel  isn’t convincing.

These characters could exist at any time, at any place.

The tone is downbeat. Rattigan’s instinct was to undercut melodrama with humour. That doesn’t happen enough here. Rattigan’s smart, pacy dialogue is slowed to a standstill by Davies’s fancy camerawork and let-it-all-hang-out acting.

There’s more cigarette smoke in the air and Vaseline on the lens than in any picture since the Forties, but most films of that era bustled on at a good clip.

Nostalgic: There's more cigarette smoke in the air and Vaseline on the lens than in any picture since the Forties, but these characters could exist at any time, at any place

The performances will be widely praised and work on a scene-by-scene basis, but too many confrontations are played in a leisurely fashion, with every line given the greatest possible weight, as actors tend to if given slack direction.

The cumulative effect is of far too solemn treatment being given to trivial material.

Hiddleston fails to make Freddie likeable, and that makes Weisz’s performance — her most luminous since The Constant Gardener, and a likely Oscar nominee — increasingly hard to empathise with.

By the end, it’s hard not to feel fed up with her whingeing.