One blog. Two opinions. One zillion films.

Well, David, I finally saw Duplicity last week, and I was pleasantly surprised.  I was also confused. I’m a bit scared of telling you how I was confused because you weren’t confused.

Although the movie is a romantic spy-romp, with a lot of camera time spent making love to plush hotels  it kept me interested.  Sometimes these simple formulas backfire; the chemistry doesn’t work between the stars, the story dumps off prematurely, ends with a whimper.   I did not see the ending coming until just before it happened.

Why do trailers take the low road?   Duplicity’s trailers were so uninteresting, and really didn’t give enough of a peek into the multiple layers of the story.  It looked like Roberts and Owen played spies who may or may not have cheated on each other romantically.  And that was boring.  If they’d included some teasers about Wilkinson’s and Giamatti’s roles, a few look-sees into the spy laboratory, I’d have gotten to the theater sooner than I did.

That slow-mo corporate rumble on the airport tarmac was great.  Loved it!  Should have made the trailer.

I’ve come to appreciate Julia Roberts’ acting.  She wasn’t in a stretch situation here, but she has a great earthy presence now that she’s had children.   She’s put some weight on too, and is comfortable in that skin.  A great step forward for female actresses.  There really isn’t another actress “like” Roberts, she’s unique.  Most of the time these days, actresses are interchangeable; they look like each other, talk like each other, and they all date Owen Wilson.

Roberts was great in Charlie Wilson’s War.

Owen was fine, too.  He seemed a bit dumb at times; he’s the softie and Roberts is the more hard-bitten of the two.

Of course, it ends up that neither is in charge.

Ok, I was confused at the flashbacks and the whole deal with the script Owens and Roberts rehearse.

Tammy,

Absent a 10-year moratorium on superhero movies, here’s one way Hollywood could improve its output: pay heed to Tony Gilroy. As a screenwriter, he knows how to leach the ridiculous from the merely preposterous; he wrote the Bourne movies, whose reputations are out-Bonding James Bond movies in bloodied-spy genre.  Gilroy’s first shot at directing his own screenplay, Michael Clayton, was brisk and multi-layered, featured a slam-bang ending as well as lingering discord. How grown-up.

Duplicity could have used some of that briskness but it’s still quite a bit of fun. Not to mention grown-up. (No jokes about defecating in one’s pants, which is more than I can say for the Monsters vs. Aliens trailer. ) The foreground is a relationship between two professional liars, played more seriously than a Cary Grant-Katharine Hepburn pairing would have it. On the other hand, the background is a brutally comic corporate war fought through spies and moles. The credits roll during a slo-mo brawl by two captains of industry, as funny a thing as I’ve seen in a while.

Onward with the lazy writer’s favorite tool: bullet points.

• Clive Owen sent two of my favorites the past few years, Inside Man and Children of Men. Duplicity has the Clive I had hoped to see in The International. (I forgot to review that movie here. Not a good sign.) In Duplicity, he’s the Amazing Rubber Cad.
• I suspect that some will complain that Clive Owen and Julia Roberts aren’t sparking a full 1000 watts.  Tough magic to bottle, that screen chemistry. Roberts seems a tad world-weary here — her character certainly would be — but the way she undersells her lines often makes them funnier. 
• What a cast. Paul Giamatti’s wall-eyed gawk, when stuffed into a wide-angle lens, is a model of paranoia mixed with mad aggression. By time time all the counter-ploys and supermoles are revealed (Gilroy must have designed his dense caper with a spreadsheet and 3-D modeling software), you realize why barely-there characters were barely there. Big fun. I’m going to mention Tom McCarthy here — just for the tag — and post more about him soon. The guy’s a gift.
• Watch for a scene with Julia and a hapless Ms Bofferd (Carrie Preston). Bofferd has been seduced by Clive and now her corporation is compromised. (You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Clive Owen fake a Southern accent.) It’s a brief scene. Julia wordlessly glowers, one of the biggest laughs.  Yet at the same moment Carrie Preston delivers a wonderful speech in her own defense. It’s a glorious human moment, the kind a good writer thinks up once he’s had it with certain movie cliches.
• Cream or lotion? The stakes are high.