An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
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London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Tony Gilroy.
Cast: Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, Tom Wilkinson, Carrie Preston, Thomas McCarthy, Ulrich Thomsen
Description: CIA officer Claire Stenwick and MI6 agent Ray Koval leave behind their former lives in government intelligence and seek an easier - and more profitable - future by cashing in their contacts and employing their expertise in the cut-throat world of big business. Working for rival multinational corporations under the leadership of Howard Tully and Dick Garsik, Claire and Ray find themselves chasing the same document, that could make each company a small fortune. In order to stay one step ahead of the competition, Claire and Ray plot and scheme, double- and triple-cross, using every trick in the book to ensure they get the top secret item first.
Country: US. 2009. 125mins
Spy vs spy: MI6 agent Ray Koval (Clive Owen) and his CIA rival Claire Stenwick (Julia Roberts)
There is a lovely moment at the beginning of Tony Gilroy’s slick espionage caper. Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti, as two rival corporation bigwigs no doubt looking forward to huge bonuses and vast pensions, quarrel and then physically fight on a rainy airfield in front of two vast corporate jets and their shocked hangers-on.
We don’t hear a word of the dialogue and Robert Elswit, the excellent cinematographer, shoots the whole scene in slow motion. It’s a small masterstroke before the main event begins.
Unfortunately, it’s just about the best thing in the film. Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, of course, are that main event, together again after 2004’s Closer. They play Claire Stenwick and Ray Koval, respectively a CIA operative and an MI6 agent, who meet at a party at Dubai’s American embassy. After engaging in some sharp patter indicating their mutual suspicion, they fall into bed with each other. She then drugs him into a long and deep sleep before decamping with some documents.
The pair meet again in Grand Central Station five years later, and the cynical repartee begins again. We are already meant to feel that they have each met their romantic match — but you can’t fly into bed together in the middle of all those people, so she denies knowing him at all and flounces off.
The next thing we know is that they have both renounced their secret service jobs, while big boss Giamatti has developed a new invention — a product that will put paid to Wilkinson’s lot once and for all without the need for a wrestling match.
Though it is not always easy to follow the plot what with Gilroy imposing subtitles such as “two years ago” and “10 days earlier”, it appears that Roberts has a job in one camp and Owen in the other.
The action that follows takes in Rome, Switzerland, the Bahamas, Miami, London, San Diego, Cleveland and New York as the pair plot and plot again between romantic engagements where the rather perfunctory sex scenes are punctuated with the doubts each has about the other.
But the location work, which is stylish if a little wishful-thinking since we see nothing of how the world goes round for more ordinary people, is really secondary to the dialogue written by Gilroy. He is clearly attempting to remind us that, though this is a hard-nosed, contemporary sort of movie, recalling the Bourne franchise, there is also room for a smattering of the repartee that we so enjoy when a Thirties romantic comedy is shown on the box.
Roberts and Owen spit it out very well. She is as starry a presence as ever and confident in her ability to match Owen, perhaps the better actor, word for word. He, who looked so drably dishevelled in Tom Tykwer’s The International, is much smarter here and certainly more glamorous as a leading man. But there’s not a lot of warmth in his presence.
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The playing lacks one vital element — the feeling that there really is romance between the pair. Capable as they both are, and well as they play against each other, Roberts and Owen have no rapport at all in the emotional stakes. It is hard to decipher whether this is the fault of the screenplay or the actors, but it is probably a bit of both.
This is substantially where Duplicity, smart and sassy as it is, falls flat. You don’t much care what happens to these two. You always cared about Cary Grant, whom Gilroy perhaps unwisely summons up in his piece about making the film.
This is especially apparent when Giamatti and Wilkinson are at each other’s throats. The poisonous nature of their relationship is much more real than anything else in the film but then they are actors with whom it is almost impossible not to empathise. In this case, they are where the real duplicity lies.
What one can say in Duplicity’s favour is that Gilroy’s cynical and often ironic idea of the perfidy of corporations and their multifarious surveillance techniques perfectly matches the times we live in.
You can’t complain about the craftsmanship on display. You can about the way it seems to suffocate the two leads’ on-off romance.
Listen to Julia Roberts, Clive Owen and Tony Gilroy talk about Duplicity
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