Dupe City

 Performances Shine in Romantic Con Game
By Morgan P Salvo



From Tony Gilroy, the guy behind Michael Clayton, comes this quick-paced espionage/con artist comedic thriller with its sharp-barbed dialogue and finely honed performances. At the center of it all is a seemingly off kilter love story that turns out to be quite conventional.
Duplicity starts off promising with crisp, tricky photography, split screen images and inventive camera angles. The two main characters, Ray (Clive Owen) and Claire (Julia Roberts), who both come from different secret agent backgrounds, have a supposed coincidental rendezvous in Dubai in 2003. The story unfolds from there as their romantic relationship and inherent distrust and of each other progresses. Forming an alliance of sorts they use their spy talents to go after two huge multinational conglomerates, pitting CEOs Howard Tully and Richard Garsik (Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti, respectively) against each other to embezzle the bejezzuz out of them. Ray and Claire plan on cashing in on the divulgence of a new secret product about to bust open on the market. Of course nothing is as it seems. While gearing up to pay close attention I found that it wasn’t necessary…everything is spelled out for you, albeit disjointedly, then taken away and re-explained in almost inconvenient way.

The movie is laden with plot twists and jumps back and forth between time and locales (“Rome… 2 years ago”, etc). You are handed clue after clue in interesting ways, invited to play along and second guess where the story will take you, hoping that you’re correct. I deduced that there were at least three possibilities as to what was really going. Well, you can play along all you like but it will get you nowhere. Here we have ONE possibility – the one you can never see coming. For once I would really like to see a movie not telegraph the ending twist by flashbacks as to the real con being perpetrated. The audience is reeled in from the beginning, taken on a big assumption ride, delivered the goods, and then duped: almost ripped off. But somehow it’s all in good fun.
Where this movie really pays off is in its performances. Everyone gets to shine in this dialogue-driven mad-cap-antics romp. Owen and Roberts are a good match, teaming up again to verbally duke it out (they sparred in Mike Nichol’s Closer in 2000). Roberts (at times sporting as much cleavage as in Erin Brokovich) shows her dominating intellect and sensitive playfulness while cautiously toying with Ray’s emotions. Owen does a fantastic job as the smarmy yet vulnerable agent, always seeming one step behind the game. Wilkinson’s Tully is a silent force to reckon with, looking so pasty that his face seems made out of crescent rolls. But Giamatti (Sideways) is once again the scene stealer. His over the top take on the paranoid, raving, egomaniac soars to new heights. There’s also an entire range of top notch supporting performances, the stand-outs being Carrie Preston (Doubt) as an innocent victim and Denis O’Hare (Milk) as a sub-par intelligence agent.
The most fun in this movie is in watching how all the characters don’t believe each other. Ray and Clair relish in their gleeful distrust. They have more fun at their own games in their blossoming love-fest than the overall con. It’s refreshing to see a cat and mouse game played out with wits and not bullets. There is virtually no violence in this flick, although there is one hilarious slow motion fight scene between the two CEOs that had me almost rolling on the floor
Duplicity lives up to the definition of its name: “speaking or acting in two different ways concerning the same matter with intent to deceive; double-dealing”. Maybe its intention was to make your brain work overtime figuring out the clues, but at the core of this flick is a simple love story based on trust.
Writer /director Gilroy exhibits extensive chops here, but I feel like he was just a tad too overconfident on the results. Combining decent rapport between characters with the whodunit stuff as a premise for a movie is a good idea. But even with all of the pizzazz, ingenious intentions and twists and turns, it’s just not that hard to follow. I like the idea of how this ends, but not how it gets there. As entertaining and good fun as this movie is, even given its engaging and as witty dialogue there is a big empty space in this movie just dying to be filled. And that would be believability. Duplicity simply lacks credibility.

Duplicity
Starring Clive Owen Julia Roberts Tom Wilkinson Paul Giamatti
Written and Directed by Tony Gilroy
 2 ½ stars