Category: Reviews

Goodbye First Love

“I’ll always love you and never know why,” Camille says to her boyfriend Sullivan, a romance in the French film “Goodbye First Love” based only on the idea that it is their first. The point the movie is making is that perhaps that’s enough, but even the film is too caught up in these longing moments to suggest anything substantive or true.

The film starts in 1999 when Camille (Lola Creton) is only 15 yet dating a college student, Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky). Their chemistry is built on their sexuality and little else, so when he drops out of school and leaves for South America on a whim, Camille should be good to be rid of him. But she’s a miniature drama queen, threatening suicide and pondering what she’ll do without him as she lays on beds in the fetal position and leans emptily against walls. They exchange letters, but it’s not enough. “I can call, but I won’t,” Sullivan explains. “Hearing you won’t be the same without touching you.”

These are romance novel lines befitting a teenager, and perhaps these empty words mean a lot to them. But some months later, Camille’s moved on, cut her hair and enrolled in architecture school. After years have passed, she starts a relationship with her older teacher Lorenz (Magne-Havard Brekke), who she bonds with on an intellectual level rather than a sexual one. The two have moved in together and even tried to have a baby when Sullivan returns home and the two can’t separate themselves again.

This is a messy relationship, and if it were in a Hollywood romance it would be transparently so. But Director Mia Hansen-Love gives it the art house, French style with low-key dialogue, expressive montages, abrupt editing and urgent cinematography with nowhere to go. It tries to make the film more visually suggestive than intelligently emotional, and it stifles the potential of the characters.

Creton is a new, young actress I discovered in Olivier Assayas’s “Something in the Air,” and she’s effortlessly warm, delicate and loveable. But her character Camille doesn’t even have much to say. Her mother talks about how before she was in love she seemed full of life, but we never see that side of her, nor do we see how someone like Lorenz can find her mature and brave beyond her age. The movie instead just has her looking melancholic, performing odd jobs at theaters and night clubs to pass the days.

And when she does speak, her dialogue can be notoriously cheesy. There’s a scene where Camille and Lorenz are driving, and he drops a big, overly poetic axiom on her that’s treated as off the cuff. Instead, the movie’s big payoff moments of romance are in Sullivan and Camille’s staring, swooning and steamy sex scenes.

“Goodbye First Love” has plenty of the heartbreak and passion that comes with a first love, but it misses out on the more grounded moments of reality.

2 ½ stars

Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock has the most recognizable silhouette in all the world, yet Sacha Gervasi’s film “Hitchcock” is little more than the silhouette of the man. It only hints at his many vices, fetishes and moments of pure genius, content instead to be an amusing caricature.

Standing in Hitch’s (Anthony Perkins) shadow is of course his wife Alma Reville (Helen Mirren), a long time screenwriting partner and assistant director who never got the attention she deserved. This is her story more than Hitch’s, about how during the production of “Psycho” their marriage hit a rocky patch. She started a professional affair with Whitfield Cook (Danny Huston) that was bound to turn into a romantic one, and all the while “Psycho” was turning into a dog of a movie.

Despite the massive success of “North By Northwest,” Hitchcock was still being called old-hat by the press, championing French New Wave masters of suspense like Claude Chabrol and Jules Dassin poised to take his throne. As a change of pace, he decided to make a low-budget horror movie based on the murders of Ed Gein (Michael Wincott), but it sickened the studio heads and the censors, forcing Hitch to finance the movie himself.

This is Film History 101. It touches on how Hitchcock bought up all the copies of “Psycho” to prevent people from knowing the ending, how the censors objected to a toilet being shown flushing on camera and how directors and actors were locked into contracts with the studios, but it doesn’t reach to explain how the studio system really worked or even how the master himself found inspiration for all of “Psycho’s” brilliant ideas.

Instead, “Hitchcock” may as well be “Rocky,” the old-guy jumping back in the ring to prove he’s still got it. Does it take liberties in the process? That’s hard to say, and I believe Gervasi, the documentarian behind “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” did his research. But was Hitchcock really bothered he never won an Oscar? Did he really think TV “cheapened” him? Did he really spy on his leading ladies in the same way Norman Bates did?

The real pleasures of the movie are the performances and the coy, immature humor on sexuality and violence. Hopkins is more dirty-old-man than macabre, but he has some fun orchestrating terror, either on set getting Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) to scream during the shower scene or in the movie theater lobby as the audience screams during the finished product. The movie’s best gem is James D’Arcy as an impeccable Anthony Perkins. He only has one big scene on Hitch’s casting couch, but he owns those ominous wide shots.

“Hitchcock” is less of a movie buff’s movie and more for someone who is familiar with the master of suspense but hasn’t dug too deep in his catalog. Coincidentally, watching his films remains the best and most enjoyable way to really understand the silhouette of the man.

3 stars

Anna Karenina

Is there something stopping Joe Wright from just making a musical? The production design in “Anna Karenina” is sumptuous in its color and glamour, but it’s out of place putting these Russian costume drama characters in an old-fashioned playhouse, a constant and misguided reminder that the whole world is a stage and we be but players on it.

Set in a rustic theater, Wright shuffles around sets and props on a single sound stage with balletic precision to transport Tolstoy’s sprawling novel to new places and move through the story at a brisk pace. It’s a daring approach, but Wright either needs to commit to his gimmick or drop it entirely. Seemingly at random we see a character in flowing evening ware clambering up back stage rafters. Sometimes a background figure will appear and perform a pirouette or strike up a tune on a tuba, and at other times the movie will forget the stage conceit altogether.

God knows this is a pretty film to look at, but boy is it garish. A curtain will rise and a multi-million dollar backdrop posing Anna as an angel in a Renaissance painting will be for nothing more than a momentary distraction. It indulges in undulating bodies during love-scenes and bathes its forbidden lovers in glaring doses of white. Wright’s long takes and wide shots are visually mystifying at times, but he chops the story up so much to account for the aesthetic.

It tells the story of Anna’s (Keira Knightley) affair with Count Vronsky (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a decorated soldier once engaged to Anna’s younger sister. The two carry on without concern from Anna’s lifeless husband Karenin (Jude Law), but when she seeks a divorce and reveals she’s pregnant, the law prevents her from ever seeing her children again.

Even in a story of many characters and romantic threads, Wright’s approach feels thin, undermining the novel’s themes of forgiveness in love because his visual flourishes don’t say all they’re meant to. Knightley is typecast in roles like this, but she’s overacting in her attempt to be bigger than the scenery. It doesn’t help that Taylor-Johnson and his silly mustache are miscast.

I’ve been a big champion of Wright’s over-stylized departures into genre territory before (“Atonement,” “Hanna”), but this time he’s drawn too much spectacle out of the sport.

2 ½ stars

Killing Them Softly

The thinly veiled allegory in “Killing Them Softly” is that the American system of economy and culture is broken, and the people pulling the strings may as well be sleazy, stupid criminals. I say that’s bull, not because I necessarily disagree with Director Andrew Dominik but because his broad analogies, over stylized film and nonsensical story prove nothing.

It’s about two gangsters, Frankie and Russell (Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn), who are hired to rob a mafia poker game. The logic behind this is that one of the bosses himself, Markie (Ray Liotta), planned such a heist before, and if it were to happen again, they’d know who to blame.

But the bosses, whoever they are, aren’t completely stupid, because they hire Jackie (Brad Pitt) to find Frankie and Russell and just treat Markie like a patsy. The thought process is, Markie and the boys need to die because a message needs to be sent to other members of the mafia that their money is safe and that the black market economy isn’t in danger.

This alone does not make a compelling argument for how American Capitalism works or doesn’t. So “Killing Them Softly” is set around the 2008 Presidential Election, and these gangsters are very well informed on politics. Car stereos are always tuned to talk radio, airport and bar TVs are switched to C-Span, and wherever you go, you hear George W. Bush or Obama talking about the economy.

Simply put, Dominik is reaching. Jackie seems to think he’s picking winners and losers by allowing some parts of this mob economy to fail and be eliminated and others to be bailed out and kept alive. But the specifics as to who dies and why seems vague, namely because this mob doesn’t operate in realistic ways at all.

There’s no sense of community here. There are no women, no backstories, no bosses, and no organized crime against the law-abiding society. There are only rules and senseless beatings. One of the mob’s messengers (Richard Jenkins) explains you can’t get anything done today without passing every money exchange and hit by a committee, which doesn’t seem plausible, only a plot device. Even the sleazy and unlikeable vermin that make up “Killing Them Softly” are constructed as such so that the movie can linger on their bile, like in one scene when Russell hears every dirty, meaningless word and threat out of his partner’s mouth in a slow motion, drug-soaked haze.

“Killing Them Softly” is disgusting, less so for its violence, which during a drive-by murder and car wreck is fetishized beyond belief, but more so for its repulsive characters and cynically repellent ideas about American politics.

2 stars

Oslo, August 31st

Addictions run deep. We may find a way to begin recovery, but soon we get addicted to our own guilt and depression. Even if we are given a break, do we deserve it?

“Oslo, August 31st” is a quietly expressive film about a man whose greater problem than addiction is normalcy. It’s an artistic, but down to Earth film that exposes the pains of recovery and the burdens of society.

Joachim Trier’s film follows one day in the life of Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie), a recovering addict. What was he addicted to? Cocaine, heroin, booze, parties, women, you name it. The important part is that he was addicted. Now he’s contemplating suicide, but he’s close to finishing his rehab program, he’s 10 months sober and he even has a promising job interview.

When he goes into the interview, the manager asks what he’s been doing for the last five years, and he finally can dodge the question no longer and admits he was a drug addict. As a person struggling through job interviews myself, it’s amazing how powerful and honest this scene is. Tell lies to get the job yet be trustworthy and open at the same time? How the hell do you do that? Any job you’ve weaseled your way to get is one you probably don’t deserve, and that’s Anders’s position on both this and the rest of his life.

Lie gives a powerful performance in appearing wounded and broken yet completely functioning. What’s harder for him is keeping a straight face as he hears from others how his problem is a greater problem for them. What they see in him is someone who avoided the tough choices of having kids, selling their parents’ house, socializing in uncomfortable situations. He took the easy way out.

Trier finds a delicate mix between hard-hitting character drama and more figuratively metaphorical reflections on life. There’s a scene where Anders sits in a coffee shop listening in on other people’s conversations. One girl reads off a list of things she wants to accomplish in life, and his mind wanders to follow the people he sees on the street back home. It’s enough that for a moment he’s left his own body and taken another, even one that is troubled, mundane or beautiful.

“Oslo, August 31st” is named as such because it allows us to recall a time and a place, but more importantly a feeling. In that moment of pain or comfort, we need to know we’re rooted down somewhere. Trier’s montages and visual poetry are artistic and beautiful, but the film grounds us and quietly, observantly, lets us know who we are.

3 ½ stars

This Must Be The Place

David Byrne’s lyrics to the song “This Must Be the Place,” from which Paolo Sorrentino’s new film borrows its title, probably sums up my feelings watching the movie better than I can. “I feel numb – burn with a weak heart/I guess I must be having fun/the less we say about it the better/make it up as we go along… it’s okay. I know nothing’s wrong.”

“This Must Be the Place” is a beguiling film of quirky pleasures, unexpected themes and surprising depths. It’s the story of an aging ‘80s rock star named Cheyenne (Sean Penn) who in a state of depression goes on a road trip across America to hunt down the concentration camp guard who tortured his father. But it’s definitely not about rock ‘n roll, nor about America or Nazis or a lot else. And yet it’s a bizarrely funny movie with muted tones, surreal ingenuity and one of the wackiest performances of Sean Penn’s career.

Bathed in black nail polish, clothes, eyeliner and a mess of hair that outdoes even The Cure’s Robert Smith, Cheyenne is in his own world. He’s got a diminutive gaze of melancholy and depression along with his look that other Goth kids, like the teenager Mary (Eve Hewson) who hangs out with him, can only try and emulate. His lilting voice and occasional giggle is uncharacteristic of a rock star, but it’s the type of voice that people pay attention to when he speaks, like when he silences an elevator full of jabbering women on the subject of lipstick.

And yet the rest of his hometown of Dublin doesn’t seem to mind he’s in his own world. He maintains a healthy sex life with his blue-collar wife (Frances McDormand) and carries on conversations about women and music with others around town who don’t seem to care he is or was a rock star.

Cheyenne however doesn’t do much these days. He hasn’t played music in 20 years and he seems not at home in his strangely pristine and trendy mansion (“Why does it say ‘cuisine’ on the kitchen wall? I know it’s the kitchen”). Even his pool isn’t filled. His wife assures him he’s just confusing boredom with depression, so when he gets news his father has died and learns of his past during the war, he starts his American road trip to hunt down this Nazi war criminal.

Sorrentino, an Italian working in English for the first time, has a skewed view of Americana that’s probably more American than most patriotic films claim to be. These small towns in New Mexico and Utah each have their own rock star quirks, and it’s as if all of their oddities are projected onto Cheyenne and back. He takes a trip to see the world’s largest pistachio, performs “This Must Be the Place” with a 12-year-old, talks with David Byrne himself as he executes his latest project and even meets the man who invented the rolling suitcase (a wonderful cameo by Harry Dean Stanton).

We never see Sean Penn sing, nor do we hear the songs that made him a star, so more time is focused on these minor figures he encounters. But it’s an important distinction, because these numerous caricatures help turn Cheyenne into a real person. It seems as if deep down behind all the makeup, gimmicky vignettes and cinematography that makes every image look like it would be an appropriately bleak album cover, “This Must Be the Place” is a simple coming-of-age story about a rock star he isn’t now and never was.

3 stars

Magic Mike

Careful ladies. Girls’ night out just turned into evening at the art house.

Along with the equally stylish “Haywire” earlier this year, Steven Soderbergh has again taken a no-nonsense genre picture that in another director’s hands would just be sugary fun, if not forgettable, and transformed it into something with intellect and class.

Now if you ask me, if you wanted to make a movie about male strippers, you couldn’t have a better director behind the helm than Soderbergh. The guy is the master of the mid-range shot and can make even the simplest exchange look like a sexy music video set piece. Soderbergh isn’t coy enough to cast Sexiest Man Alive Channing Tatum and former Sexiest Man Alive Matthew McConaughey and not include some juicy fun erotic dances. But even an average watcher only in this for the physical pleasures will see the film’s canted lens and intense low angle shots and sense there’s something disturbing going on here, not entirely an empty montage of sexy fun.

Tatum plays Mike, an independent construction contractor, entrepreneur and male stripper, in case you thought I was kidding about his business ventures. He builds custom furniture when he’s not dry humping a cougar’s face for money, so all around he has this keen understanding of women and people in general. He meets the 19-year-old Adam (Alex Pettyfer) on the job and instantly ropes him into this noisy, colorful underworld of tough, yet spotless characters and seductive environments of booze, drugs and girls.

Mike develops a crush on Adam’s older sister Brooke (Cody Horn) and reveals he’s more than just a stripper with a heart of gold. Tatum’s performance is confident, yet subtle enough that even amidst Soderbergh’s elaborate cinematography, he still looks somewhat like a guy in distress.

“Magic Mike” is an art house bromance in a lot of ways. It’s an identity crisis movie between two male strippers, one entering into the world at his lowest point and the other trying to leave it. Both Mike and Adam become friends and rivals, and their chemistry is thankfully more than skin (or leather chaps) deep.

But it does have its visceral pleasures. McConaughey is on fire as the flamboyant gangster type in charge of the stripper joint. He seems to know how to use a prop or wear a skimpy workout outfit better than anyone else. He commands an extended take in which he instructs Pettyfer to take off his clothes like a man and make love to a wall.

There are only so many times a stripper routine can be sexy before it looks sad. “Magic Mike” recognizes that and makes for a colorful film that acts accordingly and will surprise in ways you didn’t expect.

3 stars

Life of Pi

Can a movie make you believe in God? With something like that, I don’t know if any single piece of entertainment has a prayer, even a movie as jaw droppingly beautiful and inspiring as “Life of Pi.”

Ang Lee’s movie shows us how a wondrous journey through nature can be a symbolic experience, and Yann Martel’s book shows how a story with fantasy and excitement may not prove the existence of God, but will allow us to recognize him and greet him like an old friend.

“Life of Pi” instills in us the fascination with religion and spirituality that its hero Pi shares. As a young boy in India, Pi discovers Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. Some of their legends resonate with him as superhero comic book stories, exciting fables with drama, suspense and action. No one faith seems to speak to him above all, but the joy these tales bring allows him to feel the presence of a higher power throughout the world.

As a teenager, Pi (Suarj Sharma) is forced to relocate his family’s zoo to French Canada and is shipwrecked on the long sea voyage. He’s the only human survivor on a small lifeboat, but stuck along with him is Richard Parker, a playful name for a quite fierce Bengali tiger.

Their journey ashore is a long quest for survival, and the whole story seems to take place on an infinite plain of existence. The film’s 3-D allows sky to blend seamlessly with sea, the ocean’s depth stretching endlessly into the distance to create a luminous space of ethereal beauty. We see Pi’s raft resting on an untapped surface, and he seems to be a part of a naturalistic dreamscape, floating aimlessly in the cosmos of Mother Nature.

Telling this story is an adult Pi (Irrfan Kahn) to an audience of one, the book’s writer himself, Yann Martel (Rafe Spall). The writer has heard that Pi’s story will make him believe in God, and in essence, this story is an ultimate test of faith. A true believer is stripped of everything that is dear to him: his family, his home, his love and his health. Ultimately, he keeps his faith. God seemed to be there watching him the entire time.

To me, a Lutheran, this sounds an awful lot like the Book of Job. To other faiths, there may be similar stories. Martel and Lee take the symbolic story and provide it with grounded drama of visceral pleasures. There’s the tiger viciously devouring a hyena right in front of Pi’s eyes, the comedic excitement in watching Pi piss on the boat’s tarpaulin to mark his territory, the cataclysmic treachery of seeing a tanker engulfed underwater or the naturalistic tranquility of observing an ocean of meerkats in their natural habitat.

“Life of Pi’s” visual beauty alone speaks wonders. It is safe to say that “Life of Pi” is perhaps the best looking 3-D film ever made. The CGI used to create such a lifelike tiger and endless landscapes of water, sunlight, wildlife and greenery is impeccable. Different scenes fade in and out in layers over one another like characters and images floating in our memories. The evening lights of fish, lightning and insects jump out from the screen that would otherwise be specks of color on a 2-D plane. The 3-D gives us a POV that shows we’re only on the far side of a pointed pole from that wild tiger. And it immerses us in a moment that conveys the gravity of how small we look in front of that boat sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

But Lee communicates through his visual poetry what Martel could only presume with words; that tiger seems to be keeping us alive. It’s a moving, spiritual sentiment so impossible to estimate and even harder to envision on film. God will be there when we need him and leave again without warning. He appears not to be our friend but to let us know he is there. In another movie, the dangerous encounters would be set pieces, but here it seems to be nature speaking to us.

“Life of Pi” moved me deeply, both on a technical and emotional level. Few films can claim to be truly beautiful and have sincere stories in the process. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, but in the end we’re left with faith. “Life of Pi” has granted me such faith in the movies and in the world.

4 stars

Lincoln

The photography in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” often paints our country’s 16th President in stylized obscurity, the beautiful backlighting casting Honest Abe in shadows of his own history. It’s a movie that fully embraces our American virtues, and yet for all we thought we knew about Lincoln suggests there is more to the man than the icon.

The Lincoln we see here is not the towering man with the deep, resounding voice that can carry across a battlefield. This is a Lincoln suffering from nightmares, giving piggyback rides to his youngest son, wrapping himself in an old blanket, telling cute stories with his soothing, high-pitched whisper of a voice and furrowing his brow as he deals with the impasse of war and the effort to abolish slavery. This is perhaps not the man we imagined in preschool but the man that was and the man who still portrayed an immense presence.

When screenwriter Tony Kushner (“Munich,” “Angels in America”) approached Spielberg with an adaptation of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s biography, it was a sprawling 500-page script on Lincoln’s life. Spielberg focuses in on the short period between April of 1864 and January 1865 when the Civil War is coming to a close, the Senate has already approved the 13th Constitutional Amendment and the Democrats in the House threaten to vote it down.

Lincoln’s battle is a powerful paradox. End the war and readmit the Confederacy and they will certainly block the law to end slavery. Fail to pursue peace and the swing votes in Congress may turn against him. And yet if slavery is abolished and done so before fighting resumes in the spring, the war is over, as the South has nothing more to fight for.  Their fight to get it passed is a war of words, not of worlds, and “Lincoln” is approached as a stately performance piece, not a war epic.

It is more theatrical than cinematic, but Spielberg does the job of emblazoning these big ideas onto the silver screen. For all its talking, “Lincoln” is a movie of action. Their Congress gets more done in two and half hours than ours did in two and a half years, and the scenes of debate and voting are invigorating moments of politics, racism, boastfulness and insight.

And because all these historical figures are in their own way larger than life, Spielberg has assembled a cast that is just as impressive. Daniel Day-Lewis is remarkable as Lincoln. At times, Lincoln is calm and without words for all the harried politicians in his cabinet. Day-Lewis seems almost detached from the scene, but he slowly builds and shows why Lincoln was so arresting. Sometimes the end to his story is a punch line, like about how a man loathed the image of George Washington, and at others he unleashes philosophical truths of equality and common sense with the greatest of ease. Unlike some Day-Lewis performances, he melds into this role and never proclaims he is acting. Sometimes he finds the best notes when he’s just being a father, child on his knee in a rocking chair and revealing his deep humanity.

Then there’s Sally Field as Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd, a frazzled, fiery woman of great hidden power. Field above all is the one who sets the film’s stakes, heaping the burden of passing the amendment with the threat of the death of their oldest son (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and her admitting herself to a mental institution. Watch Field as she greets guests at their White House party, holding up a long line to speak more candidly with some of the key Congressmen. She appears at once absent minded and in full control, figuratively shaking hands with a powerful grip but really not exerting any pressure at all.

But best of all is perhaps Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, the Republican representative from Pennsylvania. In one pivotal Congressional scene, he goes against his belief that all men are literally created equal and proclaims that all men should be equal under the law, regardless of race or, as he says to his vocal Democratic opponent, character. The beauty of Jones’s performance is that although his dialogue is eloquent and verbose language of the times, Jones can still deliver such lines with the same blunt force he does in all of his roles.

Spielberg and Kushner have put a great deal of effort into recreating every period detail as historically accurate. We get a movie of remarkable production design in stunningly authentic and old-fashioned clarity. But “Lincoln” does still feel like a movie for the modern day. He jokingly asks, “Since when has the Republican Party unanimously supported anything,” and draws startling parallels between Obama and Lincoln by observing that many Democrats viewed Lincoln as something of a tyrant.

By ending on its bittersweet note, it leaves us with the idea that some ideas and possibilities must be withheld now to achieve prosperity in the future. There may be some wet eyes as the visage of Lincoln burns powerfully in a gas lamp during a closing shot.

“Lincoln” may not always be the rousingly patriotic portrait of Lincoln we imagined, but it’s the American vision we deserve.

4 stars

The Deep Blue Sea

As “The Deep Blue Sea” opens, it shows the subtitle “London” basking in a glistening lamp light glow as oboe and strings seem to weep over the top of it. The movie fades in and out on a lonely woman as though it were dozing to the sound of the hissing furnace. Based on a play by Terence Rattigan, “The Deep Blue Sea” is about a woman who loves too deeply. And by the look of even the film’s overly maudlin and melodramatic opening, Terence Davies’s movie must be too in love with itself too.

In “around 1950” London, Hester (Rachel Weisz) is living a stuffy, unhappy marriage with an older British judge, Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale), when she starts an affair with a young, chipper air force pilot, Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston).

It would be impossible not to love Freddie based on how Britishy and “smashing” he is at all times, but it seems as if the two are drawn to each other based on the movie’s musical intensity or their own effervescent glow they seem to emanate from the screen. They are so in love that we see an aerial shot of their pale, naked bodies bathed in soft blue light interlocking and spiraling in an ungainly dreamlike reverie.

Hester begins living with Freddie after a troubling visit to William’s mother’s house. William’s mother is, to put it nicely, a catty bitch who hates Hester and scoffs in a dry, hoity toity way that Hester should replace her “passion” with simply “guarded enthusiasm.”

After a few months together, Hester tries to commit suicide when Freddie forgets her birthday. She says the problem for her extreme behavior is that she loves too much and knows he can never love her the same. Her real problem is that although he has nothing to offer her personally or financially, she seems to love unconditionally without reason or specifics, and it causes her to act irrationally.

The two get into a shouting match at an art museum over little more than a dumb joke, and the movie spends the rest of the time in lonely one-shots and pallid lighting to make Hester look plain insane. You’d like them to deal with their problems in a more civil, timely way, to sleep on it at least, but these people can’t even look at each other without feeling emotionally damaged.

“The Deep Blue Sea” indulges in these overwrought emotions. Its monumental theatricality is all glossy polish and no natural finesse or realism. One critic described it as a visual tone poem, but this tone is erratic. One minute Hester is plain giddy and the next moment she’s a ghost, as if the world has ended around her.

Weisz can turn on and off the intensity and emptiness like a light switch, making her a long shot contender for an Oscar, but she renders Hester a moody, over the top romantic without a shred of the womanly intuition that her landlady Mrs. Elton demonstrates in one late scene.

“The Deep Blue Sea” tries to be lovely, but it’s love is lofty and extreme, a love most normal people don’t want anything to do with.

1 ½ stars