He then adds, poker-faced, that he killed said guy with a hammer. Confronting a younger man whom he’s just seen aggressively making out with Melinda at a garden party, Vic calmly tells the dude that the last guy who fooled around with his wife disappeared mysteriously. But where the arguable flaw of David Fincher’s film is that Affleck’s antihero never felt truly capable of the violence suspected of him, Deep Water only works if his Vic Van Allen is plausibly sociopathic. What Affleck brings to the part is, on one hand, perfectly predictable: The role is in the same mold as Gone Girl’s Nick Dunne, a husband caught in a situation that spirals lethally out of control. These include: a massive, magazine-spread-ready suburban house a doting, tech-savvy 6-year-old daughter and a much younger wife, Melinda (Ana De Armas), who glimmers and glistens on a pedestal like the high-priced trophy she is. This quality also turned his meta-comeback vehicle The Way Back into an enjoyable underdog sports-movie-slash character study, carried through its familiar plot beats by a star leaning into his own weary, wily charm.Īffleck is the best thing in Adrian Lyne’s new thriller, Deep Water, and while there isn’t much competition, the film-which premieres on Hulu on Friday after a series of long and much publicized delays-serves as an example of his formidable skill set within a very specific range.Īdapted from a 1957 novel by Patricia Highsmith, who specialized in sketching the seething psychologies of potential killers, the film orbits a wealthy, casually ingenious software designer who’s taken early retirement to enjoy the spoils of his professional life. “I’m sick of being picked apart by women,” sighs America’s most infamous serial monogamist, bemoaning his status as tabloid fodder while skulking around incognito in a baseball cap (but definitely not a Yankees one). That weathered quality was key to Gone Girl, which tore into Affleck’s celebrity persona with wincing precision.

What used to seem like the callow cockiness of a handsome front-runner has hardened-and deepened-into a kind of grizzled charisma, the gravitas of a frat boy facing down his own expiration date. These days, there’s an intelligence to Affleck’s acting whether or not the characters he’s playing are smart, and even if the material is beneath him. He also popped up in the soggy male weepie The Tender Bar as an avuncular drink-slinger with a heart of gold, doling out world-weary life advice to a millennial Will Hunting manqué, a part squarely in his middle-aged sweet spot. (Even his younger brother has a statuette.) Last year, Affleck was terrific in two very different movies, nearly stealing The Last Duel in a villainous role as a prissy aristocrat, matching old pal Matt Damon bad haircut for bad haircut and smirking out at the world from beneath a priceless bottle-blond dye job.

Even when he managed to direct a movie that won Best Picture, Affleck was passed over in the acting category he remains the biggest star of his generation without a nomination. Over the years, Affleck’s credentials have been either kidded ( “You the bomb in Phantoms, yo!”), critiqued, or subordinated to a celebrity status that fixed him as either hapless or villainous in the public mind’s eye.

The idea that Affleck’s character needs Pavlovian conditioning to perform more naturally in front of the camera is a wry riff on the star’s long-standing-and complex-to-contextualize-reputation as an inadequate actor, which goes all the way back to S hakespeare in Love, when he was cast, very much in-jokingly, as the famed Elizabethan tragedian Ned Alleyn. The scene in Gone Girl when Ben Affleck gets pelted with Gummy Bears by Tyler Perry is a tremendous example of a movie star allowing himself to be mocked.

Deep water