Plain Style in the Deep Water Movie Review

By Matthew Nelson

        I am looking at a review written for the movie Deep Water starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas.  The review itself was written by Brian Tallerico.  The movie is a thriller about a serial adulterer whose partners keep going missing and she suspects her husband as being responsible for the disappearances.  Due to the nature of the film the review was also tailored to a mature audience in its references to the behavior of the characters but the style in which it was written is extremely informal and plain.  It was written in the first person and includes quite a few plain style strategies that give the review the feeling of a conversation the author is having with the reader rather than a formal analysis of how the film conducted itself in the eyes of the reviewer.  Despite the ease I found in reading the review it still scored a 14.77 on the Gunning Fog Index which is relatively high for a plain style, a score of 12 being deemed the more difficult end of the plain style spectrum.  The Flesch reading ease is more proportionate to how I felt the review read, that score being 53.99.

            The first very contrasting element to the review that makes it a plain style of writing compared to some of the official style works that we had looked at was the lack of jargon used by the author.  There are a number of pop culture references and comparisons made between Deep Water and other films made in the genre but there was no use of jargon or Latinate diction that would have excluded the reader from an of the information or reserved aspects of the review for the movie critic community.  An excerpt from the review reads, “There are echoes of Affleck's work in “Gone Girl” in how he captures Vic’s temperature,” where the reference to another film that Ben Affleck starred in captures the most exclusive aspect of the review, though instead of accumulating years of education to understand the reference fully as is common in the official style, the reader needs only watch the film for it to make sense.  That level of depth, or lack thereof, is what highlights the plain style the review was written in without any jargon potentially alienating the members of its audience.

            I had also mentioned in the introduction that the author wrote the review in a way that makes the audience feel more like they are being spoken to by a familiar person rather than having to read through lines of droning cinematic analysis which is not necessarily a criteria of official or plain style in its own right, but the way it was used in this piece contribute to the plain style of literature that it was written in.  There are times when the author drifts in and out of an inner monologue and a direct conversation with the reader and this sense of inconsistency and messiness adds to the entertainment value of the review which was no doubt the indented effect, but it does become too familiar in my eyes to be considered anything other than plain and informal writing.

            In the review the author uses a number of rhetorical devices that contribute the conversational feeling of the writing, but he extensively uses rhetorical questions to engage the audience in his train of thought when he was reviewing Deep Water.  They are littered throughout the review, and each provokes analysis of the movie but none of them require an answer since, in keeping with the rhetorical strategy they are all either answered immediately after or require no answer at all since the answer was already talked over by the author. “Will the “Make Movies Sexy Again” crowd give some of the storytelling bumps in “Deep Water” a pass or is this going to be further proof that the subgenre is creatively dead?...  Is he kidding?...  Why is this man devoting so much time and capital to his theory that Vic is a murderer?...  Has Vic always seen human life as disposable?” are just a few of the rhetorical questions in the review that create an informal and conversational atmosphere about the writing.  This is not to say that a rhetorical device like the rhetorical question cannot be used in official style but the frequency of their implementation and the dialogue between the reader and the author that they cultivate create a plainer style of writing that most if not all adults would be proficient enough at reading to fully grasp.

            I thought the review was entertaining and explored the film knowledgably without alienating any of the audience by using the official style.  The devices and strategies that the author imbued his writing with for this review was plain but not boring which made the reading accessible to a general audience without subjugating them to a bland or elementary diction.