Dir: Adrian Lyne. Starring: Ben Affleck, Ana de Armas, Tracy Letts, Lil Rel Howery, Jacob Elordi, Dash Mihok, Finn Wittrock. 15, 115 minutes.
Celebrity couples possess a certain knack for portraying marriages in decline. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in By the Sea. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. The more rich and beautiful the pair, the more rotten the love they can portray on screen. I couldn’t possibly speculate on why: I’m a film critic, after all, not a psychotherapist. But whatever catharsis is to be found in the ritualistic enactment of one’s worst impulses, it’s in the very foundations of Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas’s performances in the erotic (or not so erotic) thriller Deep Water.
