Review of Duplicity

If Tony Gilroy didn't get the corporate universe "Duplicity" dwells in from John Jakes' 1963 novella "The Sellers of the Dream," I'll eat my hat. (I just ordered the anthology it was published in, since, because the tattered copy given me when I was 13 or 14, along with a pile of others, had pages torn out, I never knew how it ended. Or even middled. That tale (compared also to "Network," for example), was a less dark, more playful satire of a world in which two huge consumer products companies have supplanted the U.S. and U.S.S.R. as the world's pre-eminent rivals, and they each operate, as if in a permanent Cold War of commerce, their own highly antagonistic espionage services—to a degree never before seen on film, till now!) The movie is engaging from the get-go, at least for those who like to get lost in a maze, or who, like me, are constantly trying to stay a step ahead of the plots twists and turns and guess what's going to happen, figure out what's really going on, and predict how it will all come out. (In doing so, I often get to praise myself: "I could write these things!") Here, I almost got some of it ... e.g., I thought they were never actually going to name the game-changing new product, since it seemed to me that was never really what the film was finally going to be about—wasn't going to be part of the narrative payoff. I wasn't quite right. Close, but no cigar. The chemistry between spies Clive Owen and Julia Roberts works, akin to their bleak but intense romance in "Closer," though in tone it's really much more like the constant footsie, potential insinuation of backstabbing and pervasive mistrust as displayed best previously by Catherine Zeta-Jones and George Clooney in the Coen brothers' divorce satire, "Intolerable Cruelty." Ironic, since both movies were released as we here at Film-osophy Central were and are again going through that kind of high-stakes, anxiety-producing split-up. Be that as it may, the film increasingly trips over its own Byzantine cleverness. E.g., what, in the end, was Tully's motive? How indeed, did Ray (Owen) smuggle the product formula out—an especially compelling question because it seemed it was precisely Claire's (Roberts) seemingly gratuitous accusations that set him up for the search that would seem to have prevented it. So, if he outmaneuvered, we are owed the explanation of how (not to mention, why even have thrown her complicating behavior in there at all?) What, too, given the ending, were Tully (Tom Wilkinson) and Garsik (Paul Giamatti), the two CEOs, fighting about on the tarmac—why, and when? There's films that set up, then, in the end, frustrate your expectations and in doing so avoid clichés and the cheap, formula feel-good resolution ("The Wrestler"). There's films that end suddenly, abruptly cutting to black, so that you are forced to then wrestle with what just preceded—it hanging there, now confronting you with the need to digest it, it having been metaphorically rammed down your throat ("No Country for Old Men"). Those endings have legitimacy and do not retrospectively undermine the enjoyability of the preceding two hours. The ending of films like "Duplicity," by contrast—making little sense and leaving too many loose ends, AND seeming and unsalutary inconsistencies—makes you feel you've been duped into thitherto enjoying, and becoming intellectually engaged in, something that didn't ultimately deserve it.