Throughout movie history, more than a few major directors have benefited from stepping away from the camera for long stretches. In one famous example, Terrence Malick let 20 years roll by between his second film, 1978’s Days of Heaven, and his third, 1998’s The Thin Red Line, and, in the meantime, audiences’ estimation of Malick’s arty vagueness soared: When the elusive auteur deigned to again yell “action,” the cognoscenti, at least, were primed to embrace him.
Now, another filmmaker, one with slightly fewer artistic pretensions than the famously philosophical Malick, has emerged after two decades in cinematic hibernation. From 9½ Weeks (1986) to Fatal Attraction (1987) to Indecent Proposal (1993), British director Adrian Lyne boasts a sterling resume of hits in his chosen genre of erotic thriller. But until the release last week of his latest film, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel Deep Water starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, he had not made a feature since 2002’s Unfaithful. To give you an idea of how long ago that is in cinematic terms, Unfaithful was released about a week after the original Tobey Maguire Spider-Man.
Like Malick, the 81-year-old Lyne has not strayed from his shtick in any significant way during all those years. Deep Water, which debuted on the Hulu streaming service on March 18, bears his unmistakable directorial fingerprints, including an abundance of backlighting, an interior designer’s taste in sets and locations, and a genuine gift for capturing the offhand intimacy that exists between couples, here manifested in the untold number of shots of de Armas padding around in her bare feet on wood floors. What’s more, the film’s literary pedigree is part and parcel of Lyne’s rather touching affinity for highbrow source material: In 1997, the filmmaker valiantly attempted a new version of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita starring Jeremy Irons, and Unfaithful was itself an English-language remake of Claude Chabrol’s masterpiece La femme infidele (1969). Like many disreputable artists, Lyne has always sought respect by latching on to his betters.
So, if Lyne has remained true to himself, the only question is: Have the years between Unfaithful and Deep Water done anything to enhance our appreciation of his gifts, such as they are? It’s with some shock that I answer in the affirmative. With its relentless plotting, evocative atmosphere, and steadfast commitment to its central characters’ wickedness, Deep Water defies all trends in contemporary Hollywood filmmaking. The film is neither part of a franchise nor based on a comic book, and it defines “adult” not by an allegiance to social justice but a taste for naughty behavior committed by beautiful people. Its pleasures are not unlike film noir.
Affleck stars as Vic Van Allen, a slightly scruffy, seemingly passive former high-tech guru said to have made boatloads of money by coming up with a computer chip used in drone warfare (not the least of the awkward updates made by screenwriters Zach Helm and Sam Levinson to Highsmith’s novel). Vic is both retired in the official sense and far too retiring in his manner to keep up with his vivacious, wandering wife, Melinda (de Armas). When he is not ferrying around their 6-year-old daughter Trixie (Grace Jenkins), Vic is keeping an eye, none too attentively, on Melinda, who brazenly draws attention to her relationships with a succession of young men in suburban New Orleans. (The film’s distinctive Louisiana setting calls to mind another great thriller set in and around the City that Care Forgot, Brian De Palma’s 1976 masterpiece Obsession.)
Vic attempts to thwart one of Melinda’s dalliances by joking that he offed one of her former lovers, an offhand comment that becomes grist for the local rumor mill. As in a melodrama by Douglas Sirk, the film captures the tittle-tattle characteristic of suburbs in which far too many people have far too little to do. Yet, attuned to the way casual remarks can betray deeper feelings, Lyne portrays Vic’s joke as a kind of gateway drug: Later, when an opportunity presents itself for Vic to actually do away with another of Melinda’s beaus, he finds he is capable of doing what he had merely teased about.
Affleck portrays a character who shifts between two main modes: acquiescence and rage. Vic stomachs his spouse’s behavior until he doesn’t, which seems rather unfair to her, er, lifestyle choices. Perhaps if he was more consistently opposed to her affairs, his resentment wouldn’t boil over into violence. Affleck would be entirely unlikable were it not for the near-total amorality of Melinda, played with feral intensity by the beautiful de Armas.
As ever, Lyne has a feel for bored wives, jealous husbands, steamy days, and rainy nights. But above all, it’s this film’s incidental details that are most persuasive. Playwright-actor Tracy Letts plays a neighbor whose certainty about Vic’s guilt is, ironically, deeply off-putting — who likes a snoop? Perhaps the most memorable scenes are those with Vic and his daughter Trixie, whose eyes pass silent judgment at her mother’s “friends” and who later seems to know and strangely countenance, as much as a 6-year-old can, her father’s actions.
Lyne’s visual choices can seem soaked in syrup: all of that backlighting, all of those long lenses. But they are, at times, pleasingly classical: Several shots express Vic and Melinda’s estrangement by placing the couple on opposite sides of a wall as they argue. And, although the conclusion rests on an implausible deus ex machina, Deep Water very nearly earns its tragic vision of life, as in a scene near the end when these feuding marrieds seem to renew their affection for each other despite the accumulation of lies and bodies. This is the most impressive adaptation of a work by Highsmith since Anthony Minghella’s film version of The Talented Mr. Ripley nearly a quarter-century ago.
In a famous line in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, John Huston says that politicians, ugly buildings, and whores get respectable with the passage of time. To that list let us add Adrian Lyne’s brand of shamelessly entertaining, strangely sophisticated moviemaking.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner.
