‘Sea of Love’ 4K UHD (review)

Kino Lorber

Sea of Love is a film purpose-built to remind audiences why they love Al Pacino.

1985’s Revolution had been such a demoralizing experience for Pacino that he took a four year hiatus from acting following its failure, and when he was ready to return, he very wisely avoided another art film for a small-scale, disciplined thriller with a great supporting cast and a part that allowed him to give a big crowd-pleasing performance.

Pacino plays NYPD homicide detective Frank Keller whose incredible understanding of human nature on the job belies a deep resentment that has left him burnt out, alcoholic, and alone twenty years into the job.

Keller is working the case of a serial killer whose victims are men that placed lonely hearts ads in a local newspaper.

Along with his partner Detective Sherman Touhey (John Goodman), he begins a sting operation with his own personal ad to draw out the killer to a cocktail bar where they can be identified through fingerprints.

Frank is intrigued by Helen Cruger (Ellen Barkin), a beautiful woman who responds to the ad but seemingly takes no interest in him and leaves before she can be fingerprinted. When they meet each other again at random, Keller begins an affair with a woman who may be the killer.

Now that plot summary may have you thinking that Sea of Love is a cousin to erotic thrillers like Basic Instinct or Disclosure but even though some of the same suspense beats are present, there’s an authenticity and a working class toughness to Sea of Love and it’s portrayal of police procedure that elevates the material.

Pacino and Goodman’s detectives feel like distant cousins to the characters we find in much later, more realistic procedurals like The Wire– you can tell that the repertory of players did their research on real detectives and even some of the beats that feel outrageous like the Yankees Brunch sting that opens the film, are based on real events.

Pacino’s performance is the central peg holding everything together. This film could have been an exploitative showcase for misogynistic fears about sexually empowered women, but Pacino’s ability to transmit his vulnerability and his need to be cared for recasts the central theme to be about something very human: the desire to be cared for, to be seen.

Sea of Love is often regarded as the first film of the second phase of Pacino’s career where he traded in his internal simmering style for a higher-energy bombast, but there’s plenty of nuance and contradiction at play that make Keller feel more three dimensional than the typical movie cop.

The film also owes a tremendous debt to Ellen Barkin who finds layers in a character who is essentially there to serve the function of sexual temptation. Cruger is no rote femme fatale but Barkin brings a great ambiguity to the role and a steely side to where, from the moment we meet her, we believe she could kill someone and that’s essential to the plot.

Extras include commentaries, featurette, deleted scenes and trailers.

Sea of Love is a workmanlike police thriller made exceptional only by the quality of its cast and the skill of its lead performance. It’s worth revisiting.

Recommended.