Duplicity

The Ghost of George Clooney haunts Duplicity. A sly and stylish corporate-spy-who-loved-me caper, Tony Gilroy’s sophomore follow up to Michael Clayton is tonally 180 degrees from the 2007 legal thriller. But what's familiar are Duplicity’s themes, visual richness, reliance on star wattage, and ‘70s-esque cinematic verve. What’s not here is Mr. Clooney himself.

And that’s… okay. As some of you know, Mr. Clooney now solely occupies the top of my Hetrosexual Man-Crush Heap, a position he once shared with… another. And I fully expect George to hold that hallowed ground for a long time… or until he goes off to play for the Jets.

But Duplicity feels so Clooney-ready you keep expecting him to stroll grinning into the scenes. Not only did Gilroy and George make beautiful, smart music together in Michael Clayton, but Duplicity owes more than a little of its cool swagger and jazzy swing to the Oceans 11 films. (Stephen Soderbergh was an executive producer on Clayton, and here composer James Newton Howard does a very passable mimicry of David Holmes’ lounge-hip Oceans scores.)

What we have instead of Clooney is his Oceans wife Julia Roberts and her Closer co-star/emotional-punching-bag Clive Owen. The pair play retired international spies, from the CIA and MI-6 respectively, who crossed bedsheets years ago and now find themselves thrust together in a slick plan to rip off warring cosmetics companies. Have you ever watched Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and thought, “wow, this would be even better if Steve Martin and Michael Caine were passionate, star-crossed lovers”? Welcome to Duplicity.

When I reviewed Knowing the other day, I was stymied as to how to discuss the film’s merits without directly addressing the effectiveness of its big ol’ climactic plot twist. After all, Knowing is a film that rides completely on the mystery of What Is Really Going On.

No such problem with Duplicity. Sure, it’s chock-a-brock full of twists and turns, back-stabbing betrayals, and double-agent double-crosses, but while those are all great, gleeful fun, they are not the essence of the film. (In fact many viewers have complained that the plot puzzles in Duplicity are TOO labyrinthine. It’s true, you’ll want to lay down a mental trail of bread crumbs as the film slides along if you hope to ultimately understand who zoomed who when the final rug is yanked.)

Instead, the essence of Duplicity is simply two very good looking, dangerously charming people circling each other with lust in their eyes and stilettos behind their backs. In the process, distrust and paranoia are alchemized into aphrodisiacs.

Duplicity has been marketed as a globe-trotting travelogue of luxury and sexiness, but the joke is that only a small portion of the film takes place in dreamy locales such as Rome—and even then, you see more of a Roman hotel suite than its street cafes. Instead, like Michael Clayton, most of the heavy lifting is done in Gotham’s glass and granite offices, and even in a seedy Cleveland rental apartment.

And as in Michael Clayton, while the star power shines suitably, the film’s real pleasures come further down the credits. Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti play the blood-thirsty rival CEOs, Wilkinson with dopey, grinning menace and Giamatti with his trademark bug-eyed manic delusion. (Can we hurry up and make a Glenn Beck biopic so Giamatti can channel the Fox News host’s schlumpy wide-eyed lunacy?)

And out of the fine collection of character actors who fill out Duplicity’s corners, let’s give a special shout out to Carrie Preston for her career-boosting turn as a hapless travel-office worker seduced by Owen. Preston’s hilarious interrogation scene with a stone-faced Roberts is one of those perfect bits of film-making that deserves to become a cherished pop-culture memento.

As for Roberts and Owen themselves, their work is much more thankless. After all, the entire point of the film is that, despite the yearnings of their hearts and loins, neither fully trusts the other or lets down his or her guard. Roberts’ icy glare feels like the actress is channeling just a wee bit of her distaste for the entire Hollywood star system. (One of the reasons she works well with Clooney is he softens her sometimes brittle shell.) To be sure, Duplicity does not call for, or serve up, Warm Julia, the one-time America’s Sweetheart.

Owen is fresh off a cinematic globe-trotting excursion of a very different sort, but while he appears better rested than he did in The International, his face still looks like it’s about to take a beating. (The gag is that Owen, once eyed as the next Bond, may be a competent spy and a roguish ladies man, but he’s hopelessly, haplessly vulnerable to Robert’s steely wiles.) As much as I like Owen in almost everything he does, where Clooney helped center and give Michael Clayton a bit of warmth, Owen’s world-weary and stubbled suaveness sometimes drags Duplicity down.

Owen and Roberts do fine work in Duplicity. The film, however, is intended to be something of a sophisticated romantic comedy (think Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, not Matt McConaughey and Kate Hudson). Instead, between Gilroy’s sharp quill and the stars’ leftover Closer vibe, the result never quite achieves lightness—Duplicity comes off a bit more chilly than breezy.

Both lead characters are, by their nature, too smug and self-sure for their own good and that spills over—the film itself comes off a bit too impressed with itself. Such self-confidence can be very sexy—and it often is in Duplicity—but it also runs the risk of becoming off-putting arrogance.

That said, there’s still plenty to love about Duplicity, and I suspect it’s one of those movies that will get better and richer on repeated viewings. Not only does it boast the aforementioned stellar supporting cast, but there is—as there was in Michael Clayton—a smooth, grown-up sensibility, a feeling of mature, surefooted entertainment.

Gilroy wrote all three of the Bourne films, where he deliberately sucked the sexy romanticism out of the spy story. With Duplicity he’s injecting it all right back in. There’s not a gun in sight here—the only on-screen violence takes place hilariously between Wilkinson and Giamatti’s cartoonish captains of industry. But what Duplicity does have behind its back—behind that slick, polished smile—is a very sharp, misanthropic knife. Slipping it between the ribs has rarely looked—or felt—so good.

Comments

[Lynn Palmquist]

Into the Wild starred Kristin Stewart, Vince Vaughn and Jenna Malone.

[Mark Martino]

Carrie Preston deserves more than a few sentences. Rarely have I seen a character jump off the screen like that. I'm sure that Tony Gilroy created an engaging every-woman character for her to inhabit but I have to believe that it was Ms. Preston who made that character engaging from her first frame. Ms. Preston did an amazing job. You know people like that throughout corporate America. You couldn't help but care deeply about that person and what she was feeling. I'll probably buy the DVD just to watch her.

[Bobbye Fentess]

Mass confusion! Between the umpteen flashbacks and the involved plot of whatever they were ultimately trying to accomplish. Whattalongmovie!

I could just read the book to make a little more sense out of it....but couldn't stand to waste another minute on the whole ball of wax.

What a waste of star-power and $$$$$ to make it.

[Livia]

I like this movie. It is suspenseful for sure and thrilling. I saw this movie in the theatre and the person who took me did not understand a thing in this movie and I understood it quite well. There was a lot of flashbacks. Julia Roberts and Clive Owen did awesome in this movie. Thank you to my family member who took me to the movie and now I just got it on DVD to show other family members the film.