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Uptown Magazine - Winnipeg's Online Source for Arts, Entertainment & News

April 2, 2009


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2009-04-02

Too smart for its own good...

Slick spy caper Duplicity boasts a clever script and charismatic stars, but ultimately falls flat

C+

DUPLICITY
Now playing

An older, more sophisticated Julia Roberts turns up as a CIA agent out to reveal elaborate ruses alongside an M16 operative played by Clive Owen in this astutely handled, unpredictable, fiery romance. Unfortunately, the film collapses under the weight of its own cleverness.

Written and directed by Tony Gilroy (the screenwriter behind the Bourne films and Michael Clayton), Duplicity has slick and glamorous style to spare, but very little substance - similar to the kind of decorous but empty-headed thrillers that Cary Grant found himself appearing in near the end of his career.

Claire Stenwick (Roberts) and Ray Koval (Owen) unintentionally cross paths at a railway station and reminisce over a five-year saga that involves treacherous flashback after flashback which details how the two came to know each other in the first place.

Awfully witty banter and competing company presidents (played by Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti) - along with the occasional bedroom tryst for Claire and Ray - helps season the scenario into overripe, overwritten territory.

Just when we've gotten a hold on what's going on, Gilroy turns the tables once again - not to make more sense, mind you, but to needlessly complicate an already dazzling, capable puzzle.

Gilroy seems to take sublime pleasure in severing the timeline and breaking the narrative up into digestible chunks. Roberts and Owen act slyly towards one another through large stretches, but the natural charisma between the two can only be entertaining for so long.

Wilkinson and Giamatti are competent as cunning, if ill-informed rivalries, the bosses to both Claire and Ray. When they reform as competing corporate spies, the level of mugging between the two almost becomes too much: nothing much is apparent in their combined scenes except for shrill, boisterous arguments.

Still, Roberts and Owen daintily smile and charmingly engage one another in quirky bouts of knowing, dressing up an alluring stick-thin façade of a screenplay in the process.
— Aaron Graham

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