Sea of Love, 1989 – Movie Review

Director: Harold Becker
Starring: Al Pacino, Ellen Barkin, John Goodman, Michael Rooker, William Hickey, Richard Jenkins, Paul Calderon, Samuel L Jackson

A great review by Simon Wicks for an excellent movie. This was way before Ellen Barkin got the face lift like Sam Lowry’s mother in Brazil.

I first watched Sea of Love at a drive-in cinema in Queensland. It was on a double bill with Born on the Fourth of July – a decent enough film, but it was Sea of Love I remembered. It wasn’t just the clever plot twist at the end, but the tense atmosphere and the intensity of the performances that captured my imagination. Even then, I wondered why critics weren’t raving about it. I guess it was just too easy (and lazy) to bracket it with that very 80s genre, the erotic thriller.

I watched it again a few years later, when I was studying for a literature degree, and it was only then that it struck me just how brilliantly constructed it is. Sea of Love unfolds like a Greek drama: there is the blind hero who is both protagonist and antagonist – unknowingly his own tormentor; there are countless psychological doubles, worked smartly into the narrative; there is the hero’s private dilemma endlessly refracted throughout the multiple stories the film relates. What we’re left with is a sense of not just a man, but an entire city – culture even – in crisis.

Watching Sea of Love is like being trapped in a hall of mirrors; so much so, that it becomes impossible to tell what is real and what is not – just like the dilemma facing Pacino’s wired detective as he puts his life and his mind at risk to trap a murderer. To my mind it’s up there with Blue Velvet as a visceral exploration of masculinity in crisis. Really – this is so much more than Angel Heart or Basic Instinct or any number of Greta Scacchi B-movies that were doing the rounds at the tail end of the 80s.

And it’s not just about men. In its own subtle, slanted way, it’s as much a film about female identity as it is about male. I think it’s essentially a feminist movie. Yup, that’s right. Feminist. Pacino is incapable of achieving any kind of resolution until he understands that his lover (a very sexy Ellen Barkin) is not just Madonna or whore, or even Madonna AND whore, but a full and rounded woman. It’s feminist, in the best way.

I love it. But why haven’t the critics gone mental about it, too? It’s not a perfect movie, by any stretch; Pacino occasionally borders on the hysterical, for example, though I think his unhinged performance alone is reason enough to see the movie (same with Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant). And maybe its odd lapes into cinematic cliche make it just a little too easy to sling it in with the erotic thrillers of the time. But it is seriously underrated and totally deserves a second (and a third) look. Great movie.