Year of Release: 2022
Director: Adrian Lyne
Starring: Ben Affleck, Ana de Armas, Tracy Letts, Dash Mihok, Rachel Blanchard, Kristen Connolly, Jacob Elordi, Lil Rel Howery, Brendan Miller, Jade Fernandez, Finn Wittrock, Jeff Pope, Paul Teal, Michael Scialabba
Genre: Drama, Crime
Score out of ten (whole numbers only): 3
Watch it on Amazon
Synopsis and Review
Director Adrian Lyne's latest directorial release comes 20 years after the release of "Unfaithful", which garnered the wonderful Diane Lane a well deserved array of award nominations and accolades. This time around the director tackles the a script that is the adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel. The narrative focuses on the lives of Vic and Melinda who live with their young daughter Trixie in Louisiana. Vic is retired as he made a substantial amount of money by developing some chips for combat drones. He and Melinda have an arrangement as far as their marriage is concerned, where she can take lovers openly, even in their family home. The marriage however is becoming increasingly strained, with Vic's jealousy becoming more and more problematic, and Melinda's behavior also lacking a semblance of common sense. Vic admits to one of Melinda's lovers that he killed one of her previous lovers in order to scare him off. While Vic is successful in scaring the new fling off, Melinda just keeps moving from man to man, irritating Vic progressively more. Things escalate further when Melinda invites her most recent dalliance to a party with all of her friends, where the situation ends dramatically with the police being involved in the situation. But even then things are far from over, and Vic's violent behavior continues.
Sadly "Deep Water" is not the comeback Adrian Lyne deserves. This is a director who always has been able to illustrate, even if at times mildly superficially, the emotional and sexual dynamics of couples. His best features, such as "Unfaithful" and "Fatal Attraction", featured situations that were originally rooted in conventional premises, which eventually descended into something more dramatic (the throes of passion apparently justifying these cataclysmic events). "Deep Water" however fails to elicit the same type of reaction, since these are characters that as much as one doesn't want to judge their choices, seem to live in a bubble where common sense is something oblivious to them. In addition to their somewhat abhorrent behavior, there's also an obvious realization that their patterns are consistently the same, and these are characters who have no dimension whatsoever (they apparently have no ambitions, goals or direction in life, other than collecting lovers for one, and killing them for the other). Both Melinda and Vic just keep doing the same thing over and over again, and at some point one has to ask what is the intent of creating a narrative centered on characters such as these, where there's nothing redeemable and where they're both equally insufferable. What ends up saving this film from being a complete wreck, is Adrian Lyne's ability to stage calculated intimacy, something that is noticeable even in "9 1/2 Weeks" and "Indecent Proposal", though this film has issues of pacing/editing, since at some point it drags on for quite a bit. The supporting cast fares better than the leads, particularly Tracy Letts who is as usual fantastic. The production team is impeccable, particularly Eigil Bryld's cinematography, Marco Beltrami's score, and Jeannine Oppewall's production design. It's a film that looks good, but sadly one that has a mediocre narrative at its core.
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