Josh Reviews Deep Water

Deep Water stars Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas as Melinda and Vic Van Allen, a wealthy married couple who seem on the surface to have a perfect life.  They’re two beautiful people with an adorable daughter; they’re wealthy and both seem to live lives of complete leisure that mostly seem to consist of delicious-looking meals and drunken parties with their friends.  And yet five minutes into the film it’s clear there is something seriously wrong between them.  They seem to live separate lives.  Melinda appears to be having a number of affairs with different young handsome men in town, which Vic seems to accept.  Vic, meanwhile, maybe might have murdered one of those young lovers, who disappeared sometime back.  The film is adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel.

I’m not quite sure why I watched this.  (I asked myself that question at several points in the movie: why am I watching this??)  This is not my usual type of movie.  But I like both Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas (I think both are terrific actors, far better than they have to be based on their movie-star good looks) and I often try to give a try to movies that fall somewhat outside my usual comfort zone.  Plus, I was intrigued that this was the first film Adrian Lyne had directed in twenty years.  (Mr. Lyne directed a lot of famous films in the eighties and nineties… though none of which I’ve actually seen!  These films include Flashdance, 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, and Indecent Proposal.)

I guess there are people who like movies like this, but this really wasn’t for me.  It’s a movie filled with awful people doing awful things.  I found it, for the most part, to be quite unpleasant.

I also had a very hard time understanding any of the characters.  I guess there are people like this and marriages like this.  Well, hopefully not too many marriages involve the carnage that occurs in the second half of the film.  But I guess there are marriages in which the two spouses are disconnected from one another and yet somehow psychologically stuck together.  Maybe I’m a naive innocent, but I just found it hard to fathom what was up with these characters, and so the film kept me at a distance.  I didn’t connect with or understand either Mr. Affleck or Ms. de Armas’ characters.  Some of this might be on me, but I think the film fails in properly setting up the dynamics between these characters.  (What do they each want?  Why are they married when they seem to dislike one another most of the time?  Did they actually explicitly agree to having an open marriage?  Did Vic actually have something to do with the disappearance of Melinda’s previous young lover?)

The film is well-constructed and well-directed.  And it’s got a great cast.  Both Mr. Affleck and Ms. de Armas are extremely compelling figures on screen.  This is a movie filled with a lot of scenes of these two staring intensely while watching the other… and both Mr. Affleck and Ms. de Armas are great at this!  There’s a lot going on behind their eyes.  And there are some scenes between them that really spark.

Lil Rel Howery (Get Out) and Dash Mihok are great as Vic’s buddies Grant and Jonas, and Devyn Tyler, Rachel Blanchard, and Jade Fernandez do a lot with their small supporting roles as other friends of the couple.  The great Tracy Letts (a talented writer who is also an excellent actor, appearing in films like Lady Bird and The Post) is terrific as Don, a writer who starts to suspect that Vic is up to no good, and Kristen Connolly (The Cabin in the Woods) is also great in a few key scenes as Don’s younger wife Kelly.

Also, my favorite character in the film is Vic and Melinda’s absolutely adorable little daughter Trixie, played by Grace Jenkins.  My favorite scene in the movie is the end credits, in which we get to watch a long shot of little Trixie singing along to “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing” in the back of a car.  There may never have been a cuter kid-in-a-movie moment than that scene.  But Trixie’s cuteness is also a problem in the film.  I guess I’m supposed to enjoy the escalating psychological warfare between Vic and Melinda that the film depicts, but I had a hard time doing so, because I kept being so sad thinking that this poor little girl was going to wind up caught between them!!

There was a decent amout of press about this film when it was released, due to its sexual content and also the behind-the-scenes story of Mr. Affleck and Ms. de Armas’ brief real-life relationship that started when making the film.  The latter is, frankly, irrelevant, and as to the former… well, there are a few moments of striking nudity in the film and also a lot of non-nude sexual foreplay and other messing about.  This doesn’t surprise me from director Adrian Lyne, but similarly it didn’t add the spark to the film that I suspect the filmmakers were hoping for.  I mostly found it all to be weird and off-putting, because (as noted above) I just didn’t understand or connect to the bizarre love-hate dynamic between Vic and Melinda.

Oh well.  I’m glad to have given this film a shot, but it wasn’t for me.

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