Take a dip in the Deep Blue Sea

If you’re interested in catching a screening of “The Deep Blue Sea ” over the weekend, you should know that the Magic Lantern has extended its run. Click here to catch the podcast of my review for Spokane Public Radio, which I posted last Friday when the film opened.

And if you prefer to read, below is the transcription:

I was maybe an hour into Tim Burton’s reimagining of “Dark Shadows” when I let out a sigh. I realized, at that moment, I had reached a point where – barely a few weeks into the summer movie season – I was bored. Bored by movies that affect me emotionally about as much as a Rainbow Slurpee.  Bored by computer-graphic violence that makes bloodletting feel like a day trip through Harry Potter World. Bored by an industry that seems intent on lowering its target audience to a maturity level that would make a pre-pimply 9-year-old seem adult.

Then I watched “The Deep Blue Sea,” which opens this weekend at the Magic Lantern, and all seemed right in the world. Based on a play, written six decades ago by British playwright Terence Rattigan, “The Deep Blue Sea” has a simple plot line, if a somewhat complicated story-telling format. The setting is London; the time is “around 1950.” We see a lovely looking woman, whom we come to know as Hesther Collyer – played by Rachel Weisz – preparing to kill herself.

Everything progresses from there: It’s no great spoiler to reveal that she is saved, because “The Deep Blue Sea” is not about how one ends suffering. It’s more about how one finds the strength to endure when stuck, referring to the title, between the devil and the deep blue sea.

We discover that Hesther is Lady Collyer, married to the respected Judge Sir William Collyer – played by Simon Russell Beale – a tender, if sedate, older man. We discover, too, that Hesther is involved with a former RAF pilot, the appropriately named Freddie Page – played by Tom Hiddleston – who introduces Hesther to a realm of physical pleasure she certainly had never experienced with good old Sir William.

But the joy of sex, as it gradually tends to do, has palled. Freddie, who has never been as happy as anything other than a dashing fighter pilot, is tired of Hesther’s drama-queen tendencies. He wants to play golf, sing in the pub, not roam through museums and feel belittled by Hesther, even if unintentionally. And give him this much: For all of Freddie’s limitations, he accepts what Hesther does not: that theirs is a match based solely on the kind of passion that, just as quickly, can turn to a fatal kind of loathing. Hesther, then, is stuck – unable to stay, unwilling to move on.

So, OK, this isn’t exactly original material. It was a familiar story even when it was first staged in London with a cast that included Dame Peggy Ashcroft and Kenneth More. But “The Deep Blue Sea” does effectively capture a time, just after World War II, a place, a London still littered with war-time rubble, and a cast of characters – survivors of that war, trying desperately to find some sense of happiness in a seemingly indifferent world.

And director Terence Davies, perhaps best known for the 1988 family drama “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” besides giving this film adaptation a look that is both classic and contemporary, affects a style that gives a slow reveal to Rattigan’s story that – to some viewers, at least – may make it feel more fresh than it really is.

Far more fresh, certainly, than a remake of a TV soap opera with vampires.