Hollywood Release: The Deep Blue Sea

Adapting a Terence Rattigan melodrama to the big screen implies, perhaps unfairly, a weighty Englishness; one can almost smell the spilt lager and the picked-over plate of fish and chips that spurred the idea. And though it bears all the trademarks of Rattigan's fiery post-war plays, Terence Davies's superb adaptation of The Deep Blue Sea provides a more rapturous and fluid expression of Rattigan's most smoldering and ruthless themes than the glut of adaptations that precede it.

 Anthony Asquith is the club champ in this arena, having directed six separate cinematic productions of Rattigan's work, but the influence of pre and post-war societal drift on class relations and personal desires also attracted John Boulting, David Lean and, in the case of The Prince and the Showgirl, Laurence Olivier, whose production was the basis of Simon Curtis's dreadful My Week with Marilyn.

In the midst of foggy remembrance, touched lovingly by a perfectly realized mixture of low light and soft focus, Rachel Weisz's lovely hazel opals and ruby smackers beam out through time, showing a classical sense of directing actors that easily upends Michel Hazanavicius's quaint gimmickry. As Hester, the cuckolding spouse of a momma's boy judge (Simon Russell Beale, sad and sensational), Weisz expresses an acute sense of movement, or rather lack thereof, as her character is engulfed and shredded from the inside out by her passions for Freddie, a younger fighter pilot unable to find stability in post-war London, played with uncanny rhythm by a ferocious Tom Hiddleston.

Set in 1950 yet constantly swayed into memories of romance and war, the film opens with Hester's attempted suicide, an act that haunts the film even more than the rushes against the Nazis; the war, scarcely spoken about, is breathlessly invoked in a tracking shot of the Tube during a raid and the final shot of a bombed-neighborhood. The play itself melds the pains of history with personal betrayal, loss and depression, but Davies's adapted screenplay adds a third dimension to the narrative, that of his own memory, which, of course, is the main subject of nearly all of his work, especially his previous film, the diatribe-cum-doc Of Time and the City.

In a recent interview, Davies pointed out the use of a crane shot in the film's bookending scenes, which he lifted from an American musical from his childhood. It's not plainly evident and I don't imagine I'd recognize it without the director's comments to the fact, but it certainly gives an idea of the density of influence Davies is handling here, as well as the sense of his own artistic persona with which he imbues the material. And coming after his masterful adaptation of The House of Mirth, it shows a canny progression in his style from his early masterworks, The Long Day Closes and Distant Voices, Still Lives, able to embrace the work of a British master whilst being both faithful to the text and singular in his vision. Stripped of the bark of Davies' unique and ravishing artistic sensibility, his sense of English history and culture, and an unmistakable yet ostensibly unknowable passion that mirrors those of Rattigan's characters, The Deep Blue Sea might have simply been an adaptation of a Terence Rattigan play. Instead, graciously, it is a Terence Davies film, based on a play by Terence Rattigan.         

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