Wading Pool: Deep Water (2022)
Director Adrian Lyne centers his movie on an unhappy marriage and misunderstands the twisted sensibility of Patricia Highsmith’s novel
Many considered novelist Patricia Highsmith a difficult woman with strange, irritating habits. Not only did she drink too much and start scenes, she was also caustic with her critics and misanthropic towards all. She had few intimate relationships that lasted very long and more than once, she carried her beloved pet snails around town with her. Her 1957 novel Deep Water has a vaguely autobiographical flavor, down to its amiable but secretly monstrous protagonist and his preference for snails over people Highsmith’s tense stories of ordinary people giving into their aberrant impulses to resort to murder have always been ripe for directors looking for a new thriller. Adrian Lyne, a director known for his dark and seductive movies about obsession and marital infidelity — Fatal Attraction (1987), Indecent Proposal (1993), Unfaithful (2002) — inititally seems an obvious choice to direct the film adaptation of Deep Water (2022) for Hulu. And yet it is a mismatch. Lyne is at heart a moralist who enjoys slumming but eventually turns his stories into morality tales. So his attempt to capture the uncomfortable yet compelling amorality of Highsmith’s writing results in little more than a grim and incomprehensible Lifetime Movie.
The Story
There’s little love left in wealthy Vic (Ben Affleck) and Melinda (Ana de Armas) Van Allen’s marriage: he’s an emotionally stunted intellectual snob while she revels in throwing her adulterous affairs with young, callow men in his face. Vic despises his wife’s taste in lovers but stays in the marriage for his six-year-old daughter Trixie (Grace Jenkins), who Melinda ignores. At a friend’s party, he suddenly informs Melinda’s latest boyfriend that he killed her last one and enjoys watching him scuttle away. When questioned by his neighbors, Vic initially plays it off as a joke but finds himself making his murderous threats into a reality at a neighborhood party. The death is considered an accident but Melinda is suspicious and convinces their neighbor Don (Tracy Letis) that Vic is really a killer. As the body count grows and the rumors spread, husband and wife compulsively continue their deadly game of cat-and-mouse.
The Adaptation
An adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel should be creepy: her characters are unlikeable yet fascinating, and their misdeeds are both monstrous and yet somehow relatable. Deep Water, however, can’t get the balance right. Adrian Lyne knows how to depict the stulted interactions that make up a marriage gone sour, but he makes Highsmith’s characters glossy and superficial in his attempt to help the audience relate to them. Instead, he makes their later actions even more inexplicable. Lyne isn’t interested in the dark recesses of the human mind; he likes exploiting his characters’ mistakes, making them miserable until the final retribution returns order to the world. Highsmith’s nihilism is threaded through her writing; she puts us the minds of monsters. Lyne, on the other hand, prefers normal (if too beautiful) people who give into temptation.
The casting, of course, is where the problem starts. In the novel, Vic is a Renaissance man — an intellectual who looks down on his wife’s choice of himbos for lovers, who is far more interested in his many hobbies and interests than in copulating with his wife. Ben Affleck, so good as the sleazy “nice guy” in Gone Girl, offers nothing but a blank faced glower to indicate Vic’s inability to really connect with others. The hidden psychopath is a common trope in Highsmith’s books — the man who seems normal but treats murder no differently than cleaning out his fridge — but Affleck is so subdued that he’s emotionless. We don’t see him fooling others into thinking he’s an ordinary man, but neither can we see the sense of superiority that is the source of his psychopathy. Affleck’s Vic speaks and smiles and occasionally commits murder but the audience is left with no clue as to why someone so passive and checked out would even bother. Vic is no Tom Ripley, a connoisseur of art and genius at murder who is the protagonist of Highsmith’s series. But neither is he the man in the novel — a beloved neighbor and friend defended by his community for adhering to social norms, a murderer preferred to his adulterous wife.
Though Vic’s preoccupation with snails appears in both the movie and the book, Lyne makes numerous changes. Most obviously, the movie is set in the present day rather than in the 1950’s and rather than living off inherited wealth, Vic made his fortune from drone technology. The world seems far less claustrophobic than in Highsmith’s novel. In the movie, Vic commits his first murder intentionally, while in the novel, an unconscious rage pushes him into causing a deadly accident. Neither Lyne nor Affleck seem to understand the frustration and meglomania that transform Vic into a killer and despite the murders, Vic simply drifts through the movie, passive and uninterested. In the novel, Don is suspicious enough to convince Melinda, while in the movie, Melinda believes Vic is guilty from the beginning. And yet, in the novel, Melinda is a far closer to leaving Vic to the point of asking for a divorce; despite her knowledge that Vic is a killer, the movie makes it clear that Melinda plans to stay with him.
Two changes in particular ruin the story. In the book, Vic is repelled by human touch and sleeps in another bedroom, which explains Melinda’s exhibitionism and desire for lovers. The film, however, gives Vic and Melinda multiple sex scenes, indicating his desire for her and making their arrangement even stranger. (There is some feminist implication Vic understands he cannot “control” his wife and agreed to an open marriage, which undercuts the community’s condemnation of Melinda’s affairs). Highsmith makes it clear that Vic and Melinda’s marriage is a somewhat forced arrangement and that they rarely talk without sniping at each other. But Lyne needs his characters to be “normal” and indicates that Vic and Melinda once had a more conventional relationship (they even say “I love you” to each other). But while we can see that the marriage they’re still holding on to is decaying, we see no evidence of their former love — or even their initial attraction to each other.
The second change, the ending, is far more dramatic. In the book, Vic realizes that Don is going to get the police. When Don arrives at their home with the police, Vic is strangling Melinda to death, still sure of his superiority as he is arrested and led away. In the movie, Vic causes Don to crash his car in the most improbable way possible. Meanwhile, Melinda has found the wallet of Vic’s latest victim and burns it. Leaving aside the ridiculous way that Vic causes Don’s death, Lyne’s attempt to restore order to the van Allen’s world, to provide and ambiguous and amoral ending, doesn’t work. The audience is supposed to believe that the marriage remains intact while turbulent emotions continue to seethe underneath, and yet Vic and Melinda are too ordinary, too petty — even too silly — to thrive on these type of galaxy-brain mind games indicated by the plot. And the movie loses sight of Highsmith’s trademark insinuation that the killer can be morally inferior but intellectually superior to the average person. Lyne celebrates normalcy; he is the wrong director to adapt a writer whose own nihilism, misanthropy and oddness were reflected in her writing. Ultimately, Deep Water should feel like a descent in the murky depths of the human mind. Instead, it’s an exercise in shallowness, a glittery stone skimming the surface before sinking.
