The word was that Terence Davies’s romantic melodrama “The Deep Blue Sea” (which I discuss in this clip) would be released here in late 2011, in time for its star, Rachel Weisz, to be pushed by the studio for Best Actress consideration. Then “The Iron Lady” landed on the schedule, all was seemingly decided in advance, and “The Deep Blue Sea” was held until the spring of 2012. Awards don’t matter, but they count; “The Iron Lady” will end up an answer in a trivia test while “The Deep Blue Sea” will continue to be watched and admired as an artistic marvel. Nonetheless, it would have been nice for Davies—one of the best directors in the world, who has been so since the nineteen-eighties but has for the most part been out of the spotlight—to gain widely what has long been apparent among aficionadi: he’s not only a piercingly emotional filmmaker, and one of the great stylists of image and sound (his way with soundtracks and with recorded music and onscreen singing is passionately original) but also a revelatory director of actors. There’s a sublime stylized stillness to the performances in the movie—and especially to Weisz’s, which evokes the cinematic era in which the story is set (“around 1950,”) and renders her character’s ultimate passionate abandon all the more moving. In 2012, as in 2011, it’s one of the year’s great achievements.
P.S. IMDb carries good news: Davies is in pre-production on two films, including “A Quiet Passion,” a bio-pic about Emily Dickinson, starring Cynthia Nixon.
