The best thing about Duplicity is its leading actors — not just the snappy chemistry of Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, but also the vein-popping rivalry of Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson. Duplicity hops back and forth through time, but is stingy with clues to anchor the viewer in a particular timeline (even globetrotting doesn’t help). Now, I watch Lost, I can follow a nutty non-linear story, and after 5 seasons of Lost, I’ve seen easily 100 ways to indicate passage or relocation in time without spoon-feeding or subtitling, and Duplicity does not bother with any of them. Additionally, because everyone — EVERYONE — is lying at many points, and jet setting and double-crossing and even being plain old sarcastic, you don’t have any thread of truth to follow through the timeline. Nor can you fall for the characters when they are never what they seem — everyone is a cipher and no one is a character. It was frustrating and confusing and alienating. Regrettably my physical response to cinematic alienation is to doze off after giving up on trying, which of course exacerbates the problem. “What do you mean, when the unicorn caught on fire? I would totally have remembered that!” I was already unmoored long before my consciousness gave up. For the record, many people I talked to had the same problem, but my snarky companion did not.
Instead, I had the rare pleasure of watching Clive Owen smile, enjoyed their bantering and capering and cavorting, and giggled at the John Adams reunion of Giamatti and Wilkinson shaking their fists at each other. The undercover stuff is nice and old-school — instead of Commies versus Yankees it’s incredibly overwrought pharmaceutical giants protecting their secrets. The security protocols for the competing companies of Equikrom and Burkitt & Randle are ridiculous, though clearly more effective and plausible than that employed by CTU on 24. Chew on that for a minute. Somehow, despite the profit-driven silliness, the stakes manage to stay high enough to generate tension (until the next flash-forward/backward) and strain trust. Giamatti has an apoplectic ex-bully-bait frenzy to his character, while Wilkinson is narrow-eyed and confident. Both are greedy and pathologically paranoid — their tarmac fight is wonderful. Man, this movie almost had me!
Checking IMDB on writer/director Tony Gilroy answered a lot of questions for me about why this movie wasn’t firing on all cylinders when clearly some of them were great cylinders. He is responsible for the clumsy Proof of Life and Devil’s Advocate, but also the gleeful, unapologetic fun of Armageddon and the surprisingly terrific Bourne series. There, now you have seen Duplicity. Oh yeah, he also wrote Michael Clayton. “By the time the film ambled to an unresolved conclusion centered around two characters with ill-defined motivations or functions, this movie had completely lost my interest.” (Michael Clayton review, 2007) The conclusion was more defined, and I retained my interest more, but the same problems abound here. He seems to be taking the things that worked in his good movies and bogging them down with the albratrosses from his not-good movies. His technical skill is evident, but his story structure seems to be an afterthought.
If these kinds of things don’t bother you, by all means, go see Duplicity. Owen and Roberts are a fantastic screen couple, and I did enjoy definite swaths of the movie.
MPAA Rating PG-13
Release date 3/20/09
Time in minutes 125
Director Tony Gilroy
Studio Universal Pictures