Not Enough Passion To Be a Love Tragedy

Some critics found The Deep Blue Sea exquisite while others considered it boring and slow. If it's the choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, I just don't think the passion is strong enough in the movie to warrant either.

At its best, The Deep Blue Sea is an art piece. But most of the time, it's slow and unnecessarily pedantic. Sir William Collyer, played by Simon Russell Beale, is not brutally boring enough as a husband for Rachel Weisz's Lady Collyer to have an affair. Lady Hester Collyer's love object, former RAF pilot Freddie (played by Tom Hiddleston), is not good looking or young enough to deserve the whole big fuss.

Similar to a lot of other British movies, the whole film was shot in such darkness (a la Tinkle Tailor Soldier Spy) that if you don't pay attention, you'll fall asleep. But unlike other film critics, I do like the excerpts from Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto, written in 1939, as the main musical score for the movie. But the music also adds to the whole conclusion for the flick - a lot of style but not enough substance.

The only redeeming grace is, of course, Rachel Weisz, who not only looks magnificent in this 1950s period drama, but plays the role of the naive and melancholic Hester so extremely well!

Reason sounds stronger than love and passion in the content of The Deep Blue Sea. In the words of the mean mother-in-law, Hester should choose 'guarded enthusiasm' instead of 'passion'. Even the landlady of Freddie's London flat advised her that true love is really about taking care of your aging and dying partner rather than indulging in the young flesh of the moment!

The cast of this movie is all blue blood in acting - both Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston are Cambridge University graduates and Simon Russell Beale has been described by The Independent as "the greatest stage actor of his generation." But what a waste of talents in this flat movie!