The Times - UK (2022-03-18)

the times | Friday March 18 2022 7

arts

the director’s perfectionism. The

studio then forced Darabont to add

the happy-ever-after ending where

the inmates Andy (Tim Robbins)

and Red (Freeman) are reunited in

Mexico. And to top it all, the movie

was a flop! And what is it now? A

beloved stone-cold classic.

Kevin Maher

In selected cinemas

Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman

in The Shawshank Redemption

Will Hodgkinson

revels in a folk-rock comeback p9

James Marriott

hears a crack new political duo p10

Carol Midgley

sees Paris with Joanna Lumley p15

THE

CRITICS

ALAMY

William Goldman’s Hollywood

maxim that “nobody knows

anything” is painfully pertinent when

applied to this prison-set standout.

The production company didn’t

want Frank Darabont to direct it.

Darabont wanted Tom Cruise or

Kevin Costner to star in it (both

declined). He often clashed, on an

infamously tense set, with the star

Morgan Freeman over Darabont’s

penchant for multiple takes and the

cinematographer Roger Deakins over

the big film

classic

film

of the

week

The Shawshank

Redemption

(1994)

15, 142min

{{{{{

Ana de Armas and Ben

Affleck in Deep Water

Ben Affleck and

Ana de Armas’s

chemistry is the

best thing about

this sexy mystery,

says Kevin Maher

An erotic thriller that sizzles — then fizzles

A

h, the 1980s. A

glorious time when

men were men and

women were highly

eroticised lust

objects who felt

simultaneously

aroused and

repulsed by their part in a

sadomasochistic sex olympics that

mostly ended in murder — see Fatal

Attraction, 9½ Weeks, Body Heat and

Sea of Love. The veteran director

Adrian Lyne knows the era well.

His movies, especially 9½ Weeks,

defined the “Eighties erotic thriller”,

and it’s a genre to which he has

returned wholeheartedly and with

some success in this, his first film since

the Richard Gere thriller Unfaithful

20 years ago.

Here he makes, alas, an unqualified

mess of the landing, which seems like

a screenwriting error above all else,

but until the final disastrous minutes it

plays like a prestige movie plucked

from the late-1980s vaults, which

might have been released somewhere

between Angel Heart and Wall Street.

The setting is the present day but all

the genre cues and tropes are there.

There’s the aspirational lifestyle for a

start, with an upper-crust New

Orleans society of champagne lunches

and black-tie soirées that revolve

around multimillionaire tech genius

Vic Van Allen (Ben Affleck) and his

seemingly sexually insatiable wife

Melinda (Ana de Armas). And yes,

Affleck and de Armas began a

relationship after meeting on the

movie in late 2019, and thus the very

awareness of this romantic sizzle

inevitably seeps into their screen

fiction (just try to ignore it). It helps to

fuel a simmering chemistry between

the Van Allens.

The couple live in a mansion with

fabulous furnishings, decor to die for

and pristine kitchenware, all lovingly

photographed with the kind of sleek

advertising gloss with which Lyne

(together with fellow 1980s

commercial “brats” Ridley Scott and

Alan Parker) made his name. Vic is

essentially the Mickey Rourke

character from 9½ Weeks, but while

Rourke’s millionaire was a Wall

Street wolf, our Vic’s cash has come

from the design of a microchip vital to

drone warfare.

It’s a nice touch from the

screenwriters Zach Helm and Sam

Levinson (liberally adapting Patricia

Highsmith’s 1957 novel) and suggests

the possibility of a curse, like Greek

tragedy, sprung directly from the

blood crimes of Vic’s invention.

Secondary characters here discuss the

morality of drone warfare while

glugging cocktails. Elsewhere a news

report of a devastating drone strike is

overheard just moments before a

pivotal murder.

Melinda, meanwhile, is part

Kathleen Turner from Body Heat, part

Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction, and

the full focus of Vic’s obsessions. Their

marriage is toxic. He hates her, he

loves her, he likes lathering her in

moisturiser. She loves him, she hates

him, but his wealth and limitless

power have afflicted him with a

stupefying case of affluenza, lowering

his libido and forcing him to retreat,

most nights, into his high-tech

designer snailery. Yes, Vic keeps snails

as pets. Thousands of them. He strokes

them, he stares at them and, in a scene

of sublimated eroticism, he holds them

under gently running waters while

they slither about sensually all over his

fingers. It’s one of the great mistakes

of the film, and the great frustrations,

that the snails have nothing to do with

the central homicidal plotline (surely

they could eat the corpses?).

Vic’s affluenza has forced Melinda to

take young, and mostly dim, suitors.

She flaunts them openly, bringing

them to parties, snogging them by the

barbecue. These would-be lovers,

however, start to disappear and die.

Fingers are pointed, mostly at Vic.

“You killed him, you f***ing killed

him!” Melinda roars into Vic’s face, in

front of red-faced partygoers, when

her latest squeeze is found face down

in the pool. The stage is set for a

classic sex thriller, with raunchy

bonkage intercut with questions of

guilt, subtle investigations, and plenty

of twists and spills before the shock

revelation of the actual killer.

What we get is some of this, slowly

unfolding, even occasionally hinting at

Hitchcockian suspense. But the

collapse of expectation in the final reel

is unforgivable. The killer is revealed

with a massive shrug. The murders are

shown to be improbably executed.

And the entire project, so expertly

held for so long, just suddenly deflates,

like a raspberry-blowing balloon.

On Amazon

Deep Water

115min

{{{((