Butler's Cinema Scene

Tom Hiddleston, Rachel Weisz in “The Deep Blue Sea”

“THE DEEP BLUE SEA” My rating: C (Opening April 27 at the Tivoli and Glenwood)

98 minutes| MPAA rating: R

Twenty years ago British filmmaker Terence Davies made two movies — “Distance Voice, Still Lives” and “The Long Day Closes” — that were masterpieces of personal cinema. Low budget but beautifully conceived, the films hauntingly examined Davies’ own boyhood and youth in pre-WW2 Britain. They weren’t dramas, really (there was no big dramatic narrative), but they created an indelible portrait of a way of life, a working-class existence in which the simplest things might provide the most profound joy. Simple things like gathering with friends at the pub and over a pint singing popular songs.

In a sense Davies has been trying to remake those movies ever since. Certainly that seems to be the case with “The Deep Blue Sea,” his adaptation of Terrence Rattigan’s 1950 play about a woman who has left her wealthy husband for a washed-up fighter pilot and finds that isn’t working out either.

Set in a gray postwar London that looks scarily like something out of “1984,” the film begins with an attempted suicide by our heroine, Hester (Rachel Weisz), then flashes back to her earlier life. She’s married to the older Sir William Collyer  (Simon Russell Beale), and theirs appears to be a union of convenience and mutual respect. Passion rears its ugly head in the person of Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston, last seen in Spielberg’s “War Horse”), a former RAF flyboy who seems to be at loose ends now that the war’s over.

Ere long Hester has defied convention and traditional morality by moving in with Freddie. But of course that relationship is doomed as well. Freddie soon shows more interest in golf and drink than in the woman who gave up everything for him.

I’m quite a fan of Weisz, but “The Deep Blue Sea” has an overwrought, women’s picture feel right out of the ’30s or ’40s. There are a couple of magnificent technical moments — including a slow tracking shot along a subway platform where Londoners have gathered to avoid German bombs — but I found the movie impossibly slow.

| Robert W. Butler