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The Deep Blue Sea Reviews
A slow moving, grim and painful movie experience. The soundtrack was a hokey 1950s dramatic violin concerto. I love Rachel Weiss and Tim Huddleston, but this was a hard watch.
It is interesting to see that this, rather limited in terms of story movie, enjoys almost universal approval by the professionals, while the similarly themed and much stronger The heart of Me has a green splash with 50%. Both are free on Tubi. The acting is good here and the cinematography pleasant. What happens could be narrated in half the time.
Very great acting, in this movie. I am happy I found it on Amazon. Great Chemistry to.
This stage play adaption starring the underrated Weisz, is a bit of a drag at times but okay. The tale of being attracted to the shiny new toy.
The talent in this movie was enticing, but the script and direction and everything else about it was nothing short of horrible. The plot was terrible and made no sense. The filmography was rather dismal as well, with odd choices on lighting and camera angles. There are scenes in this movie that either do nothing to advance the story, or carry on far too long for the limited information that they convey (the people signing in the subway tunnel during the German bombing in a flashback scene comes to mind). Do yourself a favor, and just randomly pick any other movie ever made, and you will probably see a better movie than this steaming pile of monkey poo.
Felt like it was written for the stage and not for film. Poorly adapted for film, which is a pity as the acting is first rate.
The Deep Blue Sea – Nearly Impenetrable Take a respected play, some good actors, a good director and come up with a 1 ½ hour movie that looks and feels like double its length. Director Terence Davies (The House of Mirth) I might have thought worthy of carrying out this exercise - seemed to be having a bad year turning out this lethargic result. Maybe he fiddled with Terrance Rattigan's play a little too much? I enjoy a pensive period love story but shamefully found myself watching this slog, at times, in double speed! I'm sure some might enjoy this treatment but from the look of the miserable box-office returns not many. A story needs more than good performances to carry it along and it would have helped if some of the sequences had been photographed without the dreary Fog Filter permanently attached. Samuel Barber's Violin concerto is lovely but perhaps an unsuited choice for such a dead-slow movie as this. Here we have a woman that thousands of women would ever so gladly swap places with – a well above average, extremely comfortable home, steady secure income - OK little or no passion--but she did choose this marriage herself. She then enters into an affair with a wildly immature, damaged soul, who proceeds to treat her abysmally! - pushing her life into several attempts at suicide...all this time she simply puts up with an un-liveable situation. Punish yourself if you must but please spare some thought for the audience along the way.
Shallow Blue Sea I don't doubt that Terence Davis is a brilliant writer and director and of all people has a real feel for the era of the Deep Blue Sea – post war austerity, two shilling gas meters, bedsits and so on (see in particular the wonderful "The Long Day Closes", or "Distant Voices, Still Lives".) But this film is a shocker. This is a play adaptation, an intense tragedy about the need for physical love and the awfulness when it is virtually the only thing lovers have. Davis has pointlessly introduced pub sing-songs, big budget recreations of post-blitz London, and worse, strange new scenes and stilted, pointless dialogue, for no reason that I can possibly see, because the play is a masterpiece and needs no extra scenes or dialogue. It is a different kind of tragedy to see a talented writer/director acting as wrecking ball. Don't let this film put you off this amazing play. If you want to see a good adaptation, the BBC one of the 90s with Penelope Wilton, Colin Firth and Ian Holm is quite wonderful and is on YouTube.
Visually exquisite! The musical score phenomenal. I can watch this over and over again and never become bored with the overall story.
A story of unrepentant adultery, it features long (boring) shots of Hester smoking. I would never want to watch this again. Sure, one can imagine the attraction of a younger British war pilot vs a staid, though successful, older man seemingly tied to his mother's apron strings. But what about moral duty?
The Deep Blue Sea is slow moving, yet it contains enough story to create a harrowing and relatable love story inside Rachel Weisz's excellent lead performance.
Except for Rachel Weisz there was no real reason to like this - but I did. It's a look at the following M / F conundrum: Men want a classy lady in the parlor and a tigress (whore) in the bedroom (so our grannies said). Women want an alpha prince in the parlor and her kind of tiger between the sheets. But when you get one and not the other for a husband, a prince but no tiger, she's left wanting. The reverse is shown, too; a passion inspiring lover who doesn't have it together ... not yet anyway. And there's an older man with a babe for a younger wife (Weisz) who can't or won't control his nasty old mother & raise a growl in the bedroom. Momma's boys at any age aren't good for a woman. This film is a thoughtful, interesting, & skillfully crafted look at these disappointments with a short cold-shower lecture by the landlady thrown-in for extra measure. This is a film for thoughtful adults, beautifully blocked and photographed at a pace that would be slow were the flim not cut to a good length. It also would be very good - maybe better - on the stage where it originally was produced. The film has a stage feel to it.
Is slow paced, but the performances from Weisz to Hiddleston steal the show, making this a solid melancholic love interpretation.
This is a damn near masterpiece! Regretful I haven't watched it sooner!
All too often, the word "melodrama" has a negative connotation. It's used interchangeably with "manipulative" to describe a film with less-than-authentic emotions. The truth is that the melodrama is a perfectly respectable genre of film with a number of genuine masterpieces to its name (Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven comes immediately to mind). The Deep Blue Sea, from British director Terence Davies, is unapologetically a melodrama, and while I appreciated its devotion to the conventions of the genre, there's one important ingredient missing: A reason to care about these people and their problems. The film takes place in England around 1950, just as Hester (Rachel Weisz) is about to kill herself. We learn through flashbacks that she's legally married to a judge, Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale), and though she respects him, there's very little love between them. So she starts an affair with a charismatic former RAF pilot, Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston), whom she loves with an undying passion. When William finds out, he demands she leave at once, but he won't grant her the divorce that would make her shacking up with Freddie socially acceptable. She does so anyway, but Freddie is far from a perfect partner. He drinks-a lot. He doesn't have a job, and he only shows Hester love in the physical sense. Ultimately, it's her own obsessive passion that drives her to attempt suicide, but she fails. And when Freddie finds out what she's done, he goes ballistic. And with her sanity at its breaking point, Hester must decide whether this relationship is worth her life. The stakes in The Deep Blue Sea are extraordinarily high, but the film's biggest failing is that it never makes the choices seem comparable. Freddie or your life? It's hardly a debate. It'd be one thing if he was a gentleman or reciprocated the love Hester showed him, but he's something of a pompous asshole, and the hold he has over Hester never quite seems believable. It's a shame, really, because her despair is palpable, but that's the only real note the film successfully hits. Rachel Weisz, predictably, is exceptional. Hester (who is appropriately named, I should point out) is in various stages of sadness throughout the film, but she's also extremely conflicted. She knows as well as anyone that being with Freddie has been an emotional disaster for her, but she accepts the bad because the few good moments are worth it to her. Weisz sells this with poise and grace. She's a tremendous actress, and after a terrible performance in last year's Dream House, she's once again top of her game, and it's very nice to have her back. Tom Hiddleston lives up to the lofty expectations set by great turns last year in Thor and Midnight in Paris. His Freddie is a tempermental chap-sometimes destructively so. But his temper keeps us on edge, despite the fact that the screenplay doesn't give him enough humanity to make him seem like a viable suitor for the obviously intelligent Hester. Equalling Hiddleston in smaller and much more subdued roles are Beale (as Hester's husband) and Ann Mitchell (as Hester and Freddie's landlady). The film has an excellent sense of time and place, and as such, it's quite a achievement as far as craft goes. The costumes feel very authentic, and the score (though occasionally feeling a bit over-the-top) is appropriate for the kind of film Davies has made. Even more impressive is the cinematography. There's a great tracking shot about two-thirds of the way through the film, but even beyond that, the way Davies' camera captures light gives the entire thing a dreamlike quality that makes up a bit for the screenplay's character deficiencies. Nothing Freddie and Hester do together necessarily make us think they should be a couple, but the look the film gives them when they are together (especially compared to the way they look when they're apart) is etherial-almost too beautiful to be true. The Deep Blue Sea won't appeal to many people, but those who found films like Revolutionary Road and Atonement worthy might enjoy what Davies has to offer. For me, it's barely a miss. There's a lot to appreciate, but when the central conflict in a melodrama fails to engage you emotionally, it's hard to give it a true recommendation. http://www.johnlikesmovies.com/deep-blue-sea-2012-review/
NOT that shark film with Samuel L Jackson. In fact, it's about as far from that movie as it's possible to be. Set in the suffocating world of post-war London, Rachel Weisz is astonishing in this slow-moving, non-linear telling of her escape from a sexless (but not loveless) marriage into a passionate but also doomed love affair with a damaged, self-centred war veteran. It starts at the end but then takes us on a sometimes bewildering journey through episodes and decisions that brought her to the tragic conclusion. She's sometimes very hard to like, as it is clear that her decisions are a large part in her unhappiness. Caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, she may not have an easy way out, but she certainly doesn't find it. Alongside Weisz, Tom Hiddlestone and Simon Russell Beale are terrific. And Terence Davies' simple direction never takes over from the material or the performances. The slowness of his camera movements lead the viewer to focus ever more closely, and pay attention to every nuance. It feels like a long 98 minutes, because every second is loaded and weighty with nuance. Probably not for everyone, but that's their loss.