*This piece is part of our Critics In Conversation series, where two writers offer different perspectives on the same film. Read Ryan Coleman’s review here, and Jillian Russell’s review here.*
“People are strange and grown-ups are complex.” In Deep Water, after reading a bedtime story, Vic Van Allen (Ben Affleck) uses this terse, somewhat vague statement to help his daughter Trixie (Grace Jenkins) understand why her mother Melinda (Ana de Armas) acts differently around different groups of people. Trixie is picking up on a tension between her parents and their acquaintances that she can’t fully articulate or understand, but feels pervasively in every family interaction. Vic and Melinda are married, and spend lots of time going to parties together. But they return home bickering about the ways they mistreated each other all evening, and their fights often end with resolutions to invite one of Melinda’s new friends over for dinner. And when those dinner plans are finally consummated, Melinda does, indeed, act strangely, making it abundantly clear that she’d rather share her bed with this new guy than pretend to tolerate her husband or her daughter. What’s going on here?
Well, people are strange and grown-ups are complex. That simple truism seems to be the driving thematic concern of director Adrian Lyne’s career. In erotic thrillers such as Fatal Attraction and Unfaithful, he unpacks people’s strangeness and grown-ups’ complexities by depicting profoundly multifaceted characters following their rawest impulses to violent conclusions. In those films, seemingly happy, passionate marriages are disrupted––first by a singular child, who gives the lovers something to protect and something to escape, and then by a whirlwind affair, which always provides short-term relief and long-term devastation. They begin as dark manifestations of erotic wish fulfillment, and quickly evolve into conservative cautionary tales. But all the while, they serve as fascinating psychological character studies that raise troubling questions about our relationships with each other and our identification with the players on screen. If we’re not actively rooting for Michael Douglas and Diane Lane to cheat on their spouses, we at least are curious to see what would happen if they did. Their marriages seem pretty healthy, and their partners are dependable and hot, so how can these movies provide pleasure in seeing their central romances explode?
The answer is that Lyne is perhaps the greatest living mainstream filmmaker at harnessing the titillation of the taboo. He’s a descendent of Hitchcock, not in stylistic opulence or explicit commentary on voyeurism, but because he weaponizes the sick joy of seeing something you shouldn’t or being with the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. These movies capitalize on the thrill of looking through someone’s medicine cabinet or overhearing an argument through thin walls. Our guides through these morally-dubious worlds are messy, self-interested protagonists who we only like because they’re played by movie stars.
In Deep Water, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel, those movie stars are Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, who both give enticing individual performances but strangely lack the raw chemistry of their instantly-memed paparazzi photos. Part of that is by design, as the film quickly establishes the unease of the characters’ marriage. Melinda brings new lovers into their home at the drop of a hat, and Vic doesn’t stop her, which might be pretty standard open marriage stuff, until we repeatedly see Vic glaring disgustedly at his wife’s extramarital flirtations whenever he has a chance––which is really frequently, as he retired years ago after inventing a drone microchip for the military. Unlike other Lyne protagonists, Vic doesn’t cheat on his spouse, and never seems like he wants to. In fact, he doesn’t really do anything wrong in the audience’s view for the first forty minutes or so, aside from a few verbal outbursts. Affleck is perfectly cast here because he carries the weight of his public persona––the turbulence of his offscreen struggles enhance his onscreen ones. After floundering in the early 2000s in an attempt to embrace his conventionally-chiseled leading-man looks, he’s found more particular actorly strengths in middle age by playing lonely, somewhat pathetic sadsacks masquerading as headstrong tough guys. There’s a genine pain behind his eyes that Lyne converts into unhinged detachment, but our sympathy still lies with his character because we see him repeatedly being wronged.
De Armas has the trickier role as the insufferable antagonist of this domestic thriller. She moves with such casual, chaotic cruelty that she must be a genuine narcissist and psychopath, flaunting mediocre boy toys for the thrill of it. But she’s just alluring enough that we understand why someone like Vic might stick around despite her awfulness, and she serves the movie well because she’s so despicable that she makes Vic’s eventual violent retaliations against her lovers seem not just justifiable, but almost empathetic. Lyne manipulates the audience to make us want Vic to lash out, which is an especially impressive trick when the victims of his aggression seem like totally fine people (although Finn Wittrock’s mastery of preposterously boring Ivy League-types and Jacob Elordi’s Euphoria baggage make their comeuppance somewhat cathartic). The film’s ultimate masterstroke is its slow, methodical revelation that Vic is exactly as horrible as we thought Melinda was at the beginning.
What’s most intriguing is the film’s simmering sense that these beautiful sickos get off on the violent tumult of their push-and-pull. While it doesn’t interrogate the specifics of their dynamic as purposefully as stronger films might, it still gives the movie propulsive, mysterious force. It’s unusual because the characters don’t change much over the course of two hours––we just learn more about them until they seem more confounding and complicated than we’d initially assumed. Most of the scenes could probably be rearranged in random sequence and their dynamic would still make as much sense as it does in the released version of the movie––by the end, we’re left with the impression that they’ve been addicted to playing their bizarre little games and making each other miserable since before the movie started, and they’ll continue to play long after it ends. Their fundamental wrongness for each other somehow loops back around and makes them right for each other. Their fitting unfitness is best exemplified by an early scene where Melinda plays the piano at a party. She fumbles around on the keys, hunched over in a position that makes no sense and sings in a language that few at the party can understand, but there’s something powerfully magnetic about her grotesque performative self-indulgence. And Vic looks upon her with genuine love in his dead eyes, admiring all he cannot fathom or control within her. Lyne’s films use people at their worst to capture the unspoken relational dynamics of people at their best, and while Deep Water isn’t his strongest work, it’s still a fascinating reflection on relational concessions, compromise, forgiveness, and all the things we do for love.