![]() And she wasn’t joking - she was very serious.” She said that she would take six to ten of the creatures under each breast every time she went. Former editor Larry Ashmead told Wilson a story about how Highsmith “was sneaking them in under her breasts. Eventually, her friends and colleagues told Wilson, she would keep 300 snails in the back garden of her Suffolk home bring them along, 100 at a time, in her handbag to parties as “her companions for the evening” and smuggle them into France when she moved there. The self-described “strange pastime” included observing and writing about the unique mating rituals of land snails, which are nearly all hermaphroditic. But Highsmith’s interest in snails goes back to her time at Barnard College, where she studied zoology for a year and “felt a strong tenderness for animals, particularly cats and snails, both of which she kept as pets,” writes Andrew Wilson in his biography Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. Ripley, The Two Faces of January, or Carol. None of Highsmith’s other major adapted works feature snails: not Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. They are the only beings around which Vic can be truly himself, and their combined effect - a little bit revelatory and a little bit sinister - is both lifted from Highsmith’s personal life and a recurring element of her fiction. They’re not for anything,” Vic says, but that’s not exactly true. He threatens Don while casually brandishing an electric drill in the garage, and he decides to kill Melinda’s new guy, Tony (Finn Wittrock), as soon as Tony suggests an escargot appetizer. Over and over, Deep Water suggests that these snails are both Vic’s primary passion and a reflection of his oddness. During the film’s first scene in that garage, Lyne and cinematographer Eigil Bryld go from close-ups of the snails’ whirled exoskeletons and protruding tentacles to a close-up of Affleck’s eyes, gazing with what can only be described as affection at the snails sliding along his hand. ![]() Affleck’s performance is somewhere between the feigned Wife Guy energy of Gone Girl and the smirking duplicity of The Last Thing He Wanted, and nearly everything about his Vic is inscrutable.īut when Vic is in the garage of his palatial New Orleans home, amid the misting system and stacked aquarium tanks that hold his thousands of snails, Affleck plays the man as thoughtful and serene. He jokes about killing people, then he does start killing people. He’s angry at his wife for perpetually cheating on him, but then he’s also somewhat aroused by it. A computer-programming genius who is “rich as fuck” from developing a chip that helps military drones better find and kill their targets, Vic thrives in what the suspicious Don calls a “moral gray area.” He’s shruggingly blasé about the real-world effects of his invention. To be fair, Vic’s entire arc is a bit off. We know this because his wife, Melinda ( Ana de Armas), tells him he’s weird, and because his new neighbor, Don ( Tracy Letts), also tells him he’s weird, and because Vic’s behavior is, frankly, weird! This man breeds snails as a hobby - the only thing that genuinely seems to make him happy - and I think I speak for all of us when I ask: What’s up with that? In Deep Water, the Patricia Highsmith adaptation from iconic erotic-thriller director Adrian Lyne and screenwriters Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, Ben Affleck’s Vic is a weird guy. Spoilers follow for the film Deep Water, streaming on Hulu as of March 18.
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