Kathryn Bigelow has made some eclectic career choices, but perhaps none so eccentric as casting Sean Penn opposite Elizabeth Hurley in this simmering sexual thriller.
Given all that she has to do is play seductive, lounging around topless on a yacht (at one point cooling herself down with an ice cube - the minx!), you'd think Hurley's role would barely stretch her talents. But it's when she is given poetry to recite that things start to go wrong. For Hurley's Adaline is a poetry groupie to Penn's Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Thomas. They are thrown together when Thomas' photographer wife, Jean (Catherine McCormack), goes on assignment to research a horrific double murder committed more than a century ago, commandeering Thomas's brother Rich (Josh Lucas) and his yacht to visit the remote island where the crime occurred. Adaline comes along for the ride as Rich's new girlfriend. Soon jealousy casts its dark shadow over the relationships, played out on the deliciously named Smuttynose Island, just as it did a century earlier.
As Jean delves deeper into the past, the troubling story of dour Norwegian immigrant Maren (Sarah Polley) emerges. The sole witness to a rampage that left both her sister and her sister-in-law dead, Maren's testimony results in her former lodger, Louis Wagner (Ciaran Hinds), hanging for the murders.
Told in flashback, the story of the 1873 murders become more gripping than the contemporary events themselves. Loaded glances are traded between both men and women and reveal an undercurrent of unspoken resentments, just as they are on the yacht a hundred years later. But the more Jean pieces together the puzzle of yesteryear, the more her own life falls apart - into clichés of jealousies and secrets and storms and a trite and unsatisfactory ending.
Bigelow's cause is largely hindered by her cast. Only Sarah Polley is really convincing - although Sean Penn always makes a plausible prick. But more importantly, as the harsh and lonely life of a 19th century immigrant unfolds it is soon apparent that it bears little comparison to her modern-day sister's trivial complaints - and reveals intricacies of far more complexity and charge. Ultimately, the two stories never really form an effective parallel and The Weight Of Water is left floundering.
Reviewed by Monika Maurer
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