Whatever happened to Adrian Lyne? Back in the 80s and 90s he was a pretty big deal, essentially coming to define the erotic thriller genre in American cinema through movies like 9 ½ Weeks and especially Fatal Attraction. But after his 2002 film Unfaithful, he disappeared for two decades, and has only just now resurfaced with a new movie released to Amazon Prime based on the Patricia Highsmith novel Deep Water. It was exciting to anticipate this movie, so few filmmakers have that kind of a comeback after so long. Terrence Malick did it! But where his The Thin Red Line was consistent and progressive from what had come before, Lyne’s new movie feels tired, unsure of itself, and uncertain how to respond to a cinematic landscape in which the erotic thriller no longer exists.
Maybe it’s in response to that status quo that the film isn’t ultimately terribly erotic, as much as it is premised on sexual frustration. Sensual imagery is kept to a minimum, sex itself only barely glimpsed, and the script by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson doesn’t much charge the dialogue with thrilling tension. The performances even don’t feel particularly involved despite the apparent on-set chemistry of stars Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas. An attraction is there, sure, but the relationship doesn’t feel lived in, the intimacy that we do see is mundane. Part of this may be attributed to the premise that Affleck’s Vic resents his wife Melinda (de Armas) for her frequent affairs, despite the arrangement they apparently have that keeps her attached publicly to him and their daughter. It’s a frustrating situation, but not suggested to be loveless enough so as to warrant the complete lack of passion we receive from the film. There is a perverse dynamic there that they both consent to, even if Melinda clearly gets more out of it. But it’s not actually what the movie wants to explore openly, a movie far more interested in its’ own plot than it really ought to be. And so moments of sexuality between the two may have the shape of thematic satisfaction, they have none of the texture, none of the drive.
A good chunk of the film actually plays as a mystery, Melinda’s previous lover turning up dead after Vic jokes about killing him, soon to be followed by a current boyfriend. It seems to be a tease of whether or not Vic is responsible, and of course this naturally prompts comparisons to Gone Girl, Affleck’s other movie about an emotionally distant man suspected of murder. Here though Affleck is cast with much more open and direct hostility as Lyne dances around ambiguity and de Armas slips into femme fatale mode with her gleeful cuckolding. There is so much implicit tension and high emotion in this, but it is undercut by narrative tedium that comes at their expense. The roots of the story are still interesting; it makes for a compelling thriller on paper, but in practice there’s little stock to be had in the killings, the suspense over Vic’s culpability. Melinda’s boyfriends are nonentities, most of the couples’ friends are too (sorry Lil Rel). Everything is dependent on what’s going on between Vic and Melinda, but the script is too afraid to really get inside their heads, and despite his best efforts, Lyne can’t much humanize them either.
Vic is a sad, angry husk of a point-of-view character, and to his credit Affleck is incredibly believable as that type. He’s been sucked dry of any passion by this situation and for most of the movie we have no understanding why. The cruelty of this arrangement where Melinda never leaves but rubs in his face her series of affairs is not interrogated (the notion of him pursuing other sexual partners is raised but similarly not developed). And it mostly paints Melinda, framed by the film through Vic, as that old sexist trope of the unfaithful wife callously tormenting her husband through her sexual agency. We can’t see her side of things, she’s kept at an arms’ length, her dissatisfaction with domestic life expressed largely through an annoyance with her young child that feels almost like The Lost Daughter, and seems to serve mostly to prop up Vic by contrast as a good father. Affleck plays Vic as put-upon, embittered for natural reasons, while de Armas only too happily plays Melinda with a coldness that supports her villainy. But where a Fatal Attraction or a Body Heat would allow for a liberal sexuality to counter such vampish undertones, Deep Water remains inert.
Only at the end does it show its’ hand, implicit of a far more compelling premise that is left unexplored. It actually raises a pretty interesting, twisted new layer to Vic and Melinda’s sexual relationship that begs to be explored and no doubt would be in a better movie (something like Cronenberg’s Crash), but here is left alone. Instead Deep Water goes out on a really abrupt note, just as it looked to be picking up steam two hours in. And there’s an argument to be made that it’s an effective close, that in leaving this particular nuance till the end, it casts the relationship retroactively in a whole new light -and I might be inclined to agree with that if there was more to their marriage up to that point, if it wasn’t so damn dismal.
That said, Lyne’s filmmaking can still manage to impress and give the lacklustre material a visual character. There are a number of scenes shot very slickly in reflection of a dreadful mood. He also still draws one substantial performance, Tracy Letts playing with charming aggression an opinionated writer very suspicious of Vic. His role in what passes for the films’ climax is immensely entertaining, particularly as Lyne directs one of the most baffling chase sequences in recent memory.
It is a highlight of a film that has little else to baffle. Deep Water is a movie that saves its’ most interesting material for the margins, expressing some curious themes with some technical flare, but without character or courage. As Adrian Lyne’s big return, it is mostly a disappointment, neither provocative nor scandalous enough to make a mark, and a seeming lack of confidence appears to be the culprit. If adult genres like this are to take off again, there needs to be a boldness in ambition that Deep Water patently lacks. Such a shallow approach won’t amount to anything.
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