Duplicity is a Hollywood rarity; a film that’s aimed exclusively at adults with an adult mindset. It’s smart, it’s complex and it plays on the assumption that you’re smart enough to keep up without being preoccupied with the fact that you’re watching a spy movie without gadgets or explosion. Its preoccupation isn’t about external spy games, but the games couples play and it does it by taking the dating game of one-upmanship to a level of near screwball absurdity. It sounds odd, but it works and it works in no small part to the electric chemistry of Julia Roberts and Clive Owen.
Never short on mind games, Duplicity filmmaker Tony Gilroy flits us back and forth through the narrative of how two opposing spies end up falling in bed professionally to falling in love with each other. Sick of the game, they plot to leave government service and enter the private sector to get rich quick with an act of industrial espionage. The targets are a pair of consumer goods/pharmaceutical companies locked in such cutthroat competition that each office has counter-intelligence divisions locked in a super-power struggle of Battle of the Titans-like proportions.
But it’s not about the skill of the players, and it’s not about their commitment to the enterprise at hand, it’s about who can you trust. Interesting idea, since trust can be a hard enough commodity to come by even when you’re not a spy. What’s fun about Duplicity is that it recognizes the game and like any good game you have to play to win. Gilroy masterfully takes a romantic thriller like Three Days of the Condor and turns into this bizarre, Thin Man like romantic tête-à-tête, complete with rat-tat-tat dialogue and a pair of romantic leads that are so good at being bad to one and other.
To that end, stars Roberts and Owen are marvellous together, never letting the other have an inch, while still completely buying the fact that they’re in love. Roberts gets to be sunny for a change, a kind of hint of her former screen self right down to the laugh and it still kind of suits her. Owen meanwhile gets to play it straight but with a twist, he’s dapper without being too terribly much like the straight-arrow. He’s the good guy all the bad boys want to be because he can play it cool like no other. And together, the combination of Roberts and Owen is just electric, as well as the fact that like their characters, we’re not entirely sure if one is double-crossing the other, but we hope they’re not.
Basically, this film is meant for a more sophisticated pallet and I personally found that time just drifted by despite its two hour plus length. Gilroy’s tightly written script is a treat and pulled off on film in a seemingly effortless manner. Much like Gilroy’s last film, Michael Clayton, the filmmaker somehow manages to tune himself into a kind of storytelling that you just don’t see that often in modern, Hollywood movie-making: subtlety, nuance and an easy charm that comes from the appeal of a pair of hard to resist lead actors. There probably isn’t another movie like this out right now, and that’s a shame. But hey, we’ll take this, and I hope this is the start of a great trend for Gilroy.
