The Deep Blue Sea
DIRECTED BY TERRENCE DAVIES
A melancholy melodrama depicting the flameout of a once-passionate interclass affair, Terrence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea might have been called Blueblood Valentine. Like Derek Cianfrance’s wrenching dissection of a doomed marriage, Davies’ film picks over the dying embers of a volatile romance, beset, in part, by the alienating effects of social stratification. But apart from conjuring untoward LL Cool J associations, the film’s actual title is apt enough: it was taken from the 1952 Terrence Rattigan play on which the film is based, and it also alludes to the dilemma of lovelorn protagonist Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz).
She is, as the saying goes, “caught between the devil and the deep blue sea,” in the form of a privilege-conferring but passionless marriage to a titled High Court Judge (Simon Russell Beale), and an ill-fated dalliance with a dashing but undependable younger man—former RAF pilot Freddie Page, played by Tom Hiddleston. Having spurned stability with the former man in risky pursuit of the latter, the impulsive Hester is driven to suicidal despair when the reality of life in a shabby, post-Blitz London love nest fails to live up to expectations. She’s ill at ease in the earthier social milieu, but it’s an emotional—rather than a material—shortcoming that is her chief lament: Freddie simply doesn’t reciprocate the intensity of her desire.
Davies is unmatched for evocative renderings of mid-century Britain, and The Deep Blue Sea finds the director very much in his element. His smoky, richly detailed sets are suffused with bittersweet nostalgia. Weisz, too, is an ideal fit, delivering a superb performance as a woman tragically out of sync with her time and station. Hiddleston, meanwhile, isn’t quite her equal; he sells Freddie’s intoxicating charm, but the Eton-educated actor never fully convinces, especially when called upon to demonstrate the character’s intellectual insecurities.
Similarly, The Deep Blue Sea never entirely succeeds at swallowing its audience up in its lead’s all-consuming ardour. Davies’ fragmentary, flashback-heavy structure is seemingly intended to bolster the source material’s cinematic potential. But 60 years on, Rattigan’s observations are distinctly less provocative, and less profound, than one imagines they might once have been. In that sense, at least, the title may not be so apt after all.