Duplicity

A couple years ago, my baby sister tuned me into a theory of hers, namely that in every movie in which Julie Roberts appears, she always has a least one scene in which she does her patented open-mouthed toothy scream of delight. My sister was good at imitating it.

I thought about this on my way into the theater to Duplicity in Tyngsboro on Saturday morning. Because of a house showing, I was forced out of my sister's place early, and thus I had gotten to Tyngsboro in plenty of time for the pre-noon four dollar showing---me and all the retired folk of Nashua.

I also thought about the story, which from the previews, involved a double game of corporate deception by two former spies, one ex-CIA (Roberts), and the other ex-MI6 (Clive Owen). Unlike the last Owen movie I saw (The International), this was to be a light-hearted romantic drama-comedy about the two agents trying to rip off a pair of corporations in an elaborate sting---that is, a romantic caper. Owen looks much less haggard in this film.

Roberts is not one of my must-see-her actresses, but as I mentioned before, I'm a big Clive Owen fan, so I figured they would cancel each other out. Also I liked the premise, and after such a heavy week, I was in the mood for a little caper fun.

The thoughts crossing my mind as I walked down the hallway to the auditorium involved the plot twists that such a movie inevitably entails. Are the two spies really in love with each other? Can they trust each other? Who is going to back-stab whom? How many layers of deception will we encounter?

To my delightful surprise, I found that my anticipation of the particular genre of plot twists was way off the mark. I could explain in detail, but I liked the movie too much to spoil the plot for those who haven't seen it.

Suffice it to say that there are plenty of plot twists, just not the ones I expected. I love that kind of thing. I hate it when I can see the plot twists coming from a mile away, and in this case, I certainly didn't.

Moreover, I also hate fake tension in movies, such as when a character is in danger of getting caught "red handed" while in the midst of a caper, and the musical score drives up our nerves in anticipation of this exposure. That's the mark of an inferior story. Duplicity refreshingly used very little of this kind of "in the moment" tension. Instead, it happened in slow motion, like a chess game, and thus was much more complex and enjoyable.

The pacing was much more along the lines of director Tony Gilroy's first feature, Michael Clayton (2007). It was sort of a light-hearted version of that movie, but with the characters operating on the black side of the law (and honor), instead of the light side.

The movie is almost exactly two hours long, and by my watch, it had a perfect four-act structure, divided neatly into thirty minute segments.

We meet the couple in 2003 at an embassy party in Dubai, while they are both still spies. They sleep together, and Roberts' character winds up stinging Owen's character, and leaving him. We pick up the story five years later, in the present, with Owen's character in New York City, working for a private security firm. Eventually he is going to run into Roberts' character again.

It all seems perfectly normal until exactly the half hour mark, when we get a flash-back to a scene that happened several years ago, a twist that seems to be utterly incomprehensible in light of everything we have seen so far. I love those kinds of twists, provided I have the confidence that the story is going to sort them out for me in time, which this one did.

The second twist comes at exactly the hour mark, at the mid point, when suddenly we are placed in doubt again regarding the standing of the characters. Unlike the rest of the movie, the mid point takes place in the Bahamas. Mid points in movies typically play out in a "special location" that is reserved from the rest of the story, giving them an atmosphere of suspension compared to the rest of the plot.

The third twist comes at the 1:30 mark, on a street in New York City, once again shaking up our perceptions of the characters, and our expectations of how things are going to go.

We then get a seeming resolution to the caper crime, the one that, by that point, we are now expecting and hoping for. Seemingly everything is relaxed and over. But there are still twenty minutes left in the run time. Another shoe has to drop, and its a nice juicy big one.

Moreover, it is an awesomely classical one, in that it asserts the rules of justice and honor on a deep level, and denies the "something for nothing" dictum of the Postmodern era. I didn't see that coming at all.

Sorry for being vague about the details here, but like I said, you have to go see it. I don't want to spoil it for you.

But I will tell you about the existential awakening I had during the movie. Existential awakenings are my latest favorite tool in analyzing movies. Basically an existential awakening is when, partway through the story, you have a sudden clear realization of the universality of the characters' motivations and struggles, often in terms of a high-level supertext.

In this case, it occurred near the midpoint, when the two principals are on a patio in Miami, discussing whether or not to take various respective positions (in Cleveland or New York), to pull off their intended caper. At that moment, I suddenly saw them as a quintessential contemporary professional couple, a husband and wife struggling to navigate 2009 America, to pursue their respective careers while still remaining connected to each other.

As such, at times they are divergent in purpose, jaded with their lives together and apart, and their chemistry is not always perfect, but they know they are the only two people in the world who can understand each other. In some sense, they are stuck with each other, whether they like it or not---and they mostly like it.

The beauty of this scene is that, in retrospect, it turns out to be arguably the pivotal and fateful moment of the story, when the characters, having broached an agreement made with each other, choose one path over the other, and thus propel themselves inevitably towards the final result, that nice juicy classical one at the very end that left me with a smile on my face.

On the way home, it occurred to me that the movie is somewhat in the genre of Stanley Donen's Charade (1963), although one updated for the Postmodern era. Fans of Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti will both like this movie. Both had very fun supporting roles.

And yes, Roberts gets her open-mouth laugh, but not quite the girlish scream of her youth. It's been twenty years since Mystic Pizza (1988), and the woman has a couple kids now.