There’s a scene in Duplicity where corporate spies Clive Owen and Julia Roberts duck into a bar to talk. Five years ago, she was with the CIA, he was with MI6, and after a one-night rendezvous in a Dubai hotel room, she drugged him, stole some top-secret information, and was on a flight out of the country before he even woke up. Now they’re both corporate spies surprised to learn they’re working together again, and writer/director Tony Gilroy (who also made Michael Clayton) supplies them with some especially juicy movie-movie dialogue with which to express their sexy, sexy mutual distrust. Owen gets to deliver the capper: “Maybe you’re so used to having your legs in the air,” he says, “that you don’t really know when you’re upside down, sister. I own you.”Here’s some of the stuff I love about Duplicity. I love that later on in the film, a bunch of other characters listen to a recording of this conversation, and they take even more delight in Owen’s snappy dialogue as we in the audience did. I love that the plot revolves around a mysterious, earth-shattering product that corporate CEO Tom Wilkinson plans to unveil in a couple of weeks, and that just when you think Gilroy is going to take the easy way out, like David Mamet did in The Spanish Prisoner, and never tell you want the product actually is, he goes ahead and tells you. He names the McGuffin! (I don't want to spoil it here, but it’s such a delicious joke that it's all I can do not to blurt it out anyway.) I love that Gilroy hired Robert Elswit, Paul Thomas Anderson’s regular cinematographer, to shoot the picture — everything from the immaculate corporate office furniture to the luxury hotel rooms to Paul Giamatti’s face looks so soft and creamy you practically want to reach into the screen. And I love that the credits play under a hilarious scene of Giamatti and Wilkinson wrestling each other in the rain on the tarmac of an airport, the sequence shot in luxurious slow motion that extends every wobble of their middle-aged cheeks.
And of course, I loved Clive Owen, who’s one of those lucky actors whose uninflected, effortless, it-is-what-it-is acting style makes it practically impossible for him to ever give a bad performance. Gilroy also makes shrewd use of Julia Roberts, an actress who (to me, anyway) always seemed a little cold and calculating, even in her heyday as America’s romantic comedy sweetheart. I was very pleased that in Duplicity, when Roberts lets loose with that trademark Pretty Woman horse laugh, her character is really just playing a part in an elaborate con. The film’s running gag, in fact, is that Owen and Roberts are partners in a scam that could net them each millions of dollars if everything goes right — and yet their every instinct tells them that the other person can’t be trusted. They're sleeping with a scorpion; surely it's only a matter of time before they get stung, right?
Yes, it’s one of those movies where everyone is running a scam on everyone else and the director pulls the rug out from under you so many times you wonder if you’re ever going to see the floor. I’ve read reviews complaining that the plot is too hard to follow, but I kept up with it fine — and I still didn’t see any of the twists coming. I wish all Hollywood movies would show me this good a time while they pick my pocket.
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