Movie Breakdown: Deep Water (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
You know, Ana de Armas is a talented actor, Ben Affleck can steal a scene when he’s actively participating in a film, and Adrian Lyne has made some of the great erotic flicks of the last thirty years. Does any of it sway my opinion that this film is going to terrible? No, no it doesn’t.
Post-Screening Ramble:
The problem with Deep Water is that it doesn’t go far enough. I mean there’s lots of problems with it – incomprehensible storyline, weak characters, a sense of intentional repetition to every scene that does nothing for the pace of the film – but where it really fails as an “erotic thriller” is that it just never pushes any limits. And in a film where the main draw is sex-crazy Ana de Armas torturing Ben Affleck to the edge of sanity with her sexuality, limits need to be pushed if not broken. Instead, Adrian Lyne (the man who had Glenn Close put a cat in boiling water) soft shoes a, frankly, boring film where two uninteresting, ill-defined characters circle each other endlessly. de Armas plays Melinda, a emotionally exuberant young lady who likes to bed other men besides her husband, Vic (Ben Affleck in full-on “cashing paychecks to pay the alimony” mode), and then shove it in his face when all he’s trying to do is play in his snail cave (there is snail cave in this movie and though I tried and tried I could not figure out what the metaphor pointed to) and occasionally threaten people. I wish I could say there was more to this movie, but Lyne dumps the plot on to the table in the first act and then spends the rest of the film spinning and spinning and spinning towards what we already know. But I’ve strayed from my point: this film needs to go hard. There needs to be graphic sex, a ton of nudity from all parties, darkness on full display, but it just never gets there. And I don’t say this as the town pervert, I say this as someone who just watched an erotic thriller that lacked entirely in eroticism. A film that limped along trying to make me feel like raw, hot emotion was on display, when this was anything but the case.
One Last Thought:
The ending of this film features award-winning actor and writer Tracy Letts erratically driving a Prius, screaming at his telephone as Ben Affleck chases him on a mountain bike. I’m still shaking my head.
Another Last Thought:
People are going to say this is a successfully campy film. But camp has style and intention and this is just a dim bulb of a movie with some atrocious character writing and equally horrible dialogue. Camp can be beautiful, this is just boring.
