The novels of Patricia Highsmith are a gift to filmmakers. Murderous levels of desire and jealousy simmer in protagonists, often criminals or outsiders, whose calculating observations power page after page in a slow burn towards a dreadful denouement. Save for her one extraordinary romance, Carol (aka The Price of Salt), it is the underbelly of human nature that captured Highsmith.
The marriage of Highsmith’s cool imagination with that of Mr-‘80s-and-‘90s-erotic-thrillers, Adrian Lyne makes for a partnership just as peculiar as the one shared by Vic and Melinda Van Allen. They are played by Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, whose former real-couple status adds a sheen of movie-star mythology to the picture. Residents in an affluent suburb where someone is always throwing a party, Vic is so filthy rich that he has retired after inventing a computer chip integral to drone warfare, while Melinda is a beautiful, sexual dervish with limited interest in mothering their young daughter.
They have an arrangement that she is allowed to have affairs, but when the curtain lifts and she is flagrantly kissing the brawny Joel (Brendan Miller) in full view of party guests, this understanding begins to curdle, with Vic seemingly as offended by the meathead chosen as by the fact of her infidelities. He cooly tells Joel that he murdered a previous “friend” (the euphemistic term used for Melinda’s lovers) in a ruse to run Joel out of town. News of this spreads through the community, so when a body shows up at a pool party, Vic is a suspect. Tracey Letts plays a suspicious novelist looking for his next book idea, lending a shrewd and scene-stealing presence.
Lyne films a clique of interchangeable McMansions under a sterile, green light as if their rich occupants are lab rats. Shots are often framed through doorways and from the tops of staircases, aligning us to the perspective of Vic as he stalks his wife and her “friends” in a state of mounting fury. So far, so thriller-playbook, but there is a competing tone at play. Zach Helm and Sam Levinson’s screenplay filters out the taut intelligence of Highsmith’s prose the better to trade in banalities. It is bizarre to watch an actor as committed as de Armas giving loaded deliveries of lines like “This is amazing!” about a grilled cheese sandwich. Naturalistic filler words like “huh” and “what” crop up a lot, seeming silly in the stylized world of an erotic thriller.
The camera loves Ana de Armas. Its obsession with her belongs to her husband. She is a slinky bombshell always ready to return serve on the male gaze that defines Melinda in its appreciation and resentment. “There wasn’t a word for the way he felt about Melinda, for that combination of loathing and devotion,” writes Highsmith from Vic’s perspective. Although the film makes several large changes to enable more balanced gender representation, Melinda is still most often framed through the eyes of men. De Armas factors this in, ratcheting up her sex kitten energy to reflect that Melinda is a performer in her own right, a character whose frustrations at being a trophy wife are never fully voiced, only hinted at, and rather than trust Vic with the truth, she uses sex as a means of control.
Ben Affleck is a more confounding presence. It’s always tricky to adapt a novel’s quiet protagonist, who we access by reading their interior logic, into a performance. Success depends on casting an actor whose energy feels right, and with the capacity to show inner life. Affleck is trying. I will fight anyone who says otherwise. His results are – in their own way – fabulous even if they are at odds with the disconcerting tension of the narrative.
Ben Affleck is not to blame for possessing arrogant good looks. He is a brilliant actor, alive to nuance, yet he is not chameleonic. He is a 6’3 square-jawed Adonis who has excelled throughout his career on riffing on that, from playing the proprietor of the Fashionable Male store in Kevin Smith’s “Mallrats” to playing another suspected murderer in David Fincher’s “Gone Girl.” The difference between Nick Dunne and Vic Van Allen is that whereas Gillian Flynn establishes Nick as slick and handsome, Vic is described by Highsmith as “of a little less than medium height” and “a rather pudgy figure” while “his blue eyes, wide, intelligent and unsurprisable, gave no clue as to what he was thinking or feeling.”
It matters to the marriage’s dynamic whether Vic holds his own on-screen opposite de Armas, which Affleck does, or whether he is more of a talented Mr. Ripley, melting into the background, scheming. Make-overs of average-looking characters are scarcely unheard of in Hollywood but it goes deeper than that. Affleck has an ironic quality, that comically undermines the menacing mood as his deeds grow darker. He is so at home in his hulking body that furtive tasks, which should be done shiftily, are carried out with muscular assurance. There is no fear that any of the boys who make Vic a cuckold pose a serious threat, for Affleck towers over them.
Without the gravitas of a serious lead man, the two-hour film suffers from listless pacing. Its climax has been rewritten to enable greater equality between the Van Allens, blunting both its impact and Vic’s entire character motivation. Yet, its curiosity factor is not to be denied. “Deep Water” contains some earnestly committed performances, a ridiculous car chase, a snail emporium, and a sparkling teaser for Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s “Blonde.” The dynamic between her and Affleck is fascinating: not ridiculous enough to be camp, but not far off. [B-]
“Deep Water” hits Hulu on March 18.