April 13, 2009: Duplicity
I hadn’t necessarily planned to see Duplicity, and the previews weren’t setting it apart from standard genre fare, but I happened to be going to the movies with friends one night, and this came up as a selection. I can take or leave Julia Roberts these days, but I’ll happily see pretty much anything Clive Owen signs up for, so that tipped it into “acceptable” territory. Clive Owen and Julia Roberts had previously worked together in the 2004 Mike Nichols film Closer, and their “chemistry plus animosity” from that film translates well to the new setting with them as duelling but romantically linked spies. I found that Duplicity was better than expected.
Duplicity writer/director Tony Gilroy is a hot property in Hollywood these days. He’s the writing force behind the screen adaptations of the Bourne movies, which have been immensely successful. His directorial debut a couple of years ago, Michael Clayton, reviewed well in general and was successful at the Oscars. Here he is again, with another complex mystery/drama. A couple of ex-secret agents try to make their big payday by colluding to rip off big corporations. At the same time, sexual sparks fly as they try to figure out which one of them might be gaming the other, refusing to trust each other while grudgingly realizing that in fact the other is the only one each of them can and wants to trust anyway.
There are juicy supporting roles here for Tom Wilkinson, as well as the wildly underrated Paul Giamatti, as the warring heads of two personal-care products companies. Screwball antics and scenery chewing are things these two character actors turned leading men don’t often get a chance to do. They keep the light tone of the film alive when things start to get too serious, and remind us that this isn’t meant to be a tale which could have come from reality.
The only serious complaint I have about this film is how it overuses a time-jumping narrative to the point of it being a crutch. Of course we need to flash back to years earlier to understand how these characters know each other, and to see how they have hatched their plan. But then as the flashbacks become more focused and more frequent, the line is crossed into laziness as some mystery is set up in the present day and then answered by a flashback. I was reminded of Dan Brown’s book The Da Vinci Code, in which seemingly the end of every chapter leaves the reader hanging on an arbitrary cliffhanger, which is resolved in the opening pages of the next chapter.
In the end, crime doesn’t pay, or at least the dumber criminals don’t succeed. I don’t consider this to be a spoiler since pretty much everyone in the movie is trying to commit a crime of some kind. Duplicity is a passable timewaster, with more meat to it than the trailers would suggest, but it’s hardly a must-see.
Competent genre flick, good supporting characters.
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