"Duplicity" (Tony Gilroy, 2009)

*THIS POST CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS*

“Duplicity” is to “Michael Clayton” what “Scoop” was to “Match Point” – it reworks the same theme (an anti-corporate diversion), but in a comedic manner. It’s also a lesser movie, just like “Scoop” was. But it remains a successful one.

The romantic couple, played by Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, seem to meet for the first time more than once in the course of “Duplicity”. Before we realize what’s Gilroy’s trick all about, we get a semi-spooky scene of Roberts not recognizing Owen, even though we know they slept with each other five years ago. Her act is so good that it becomes eerie – not only because it turns New York into Marienbad for a second, but also because it ultimately undermines the logic of the movie (there was no *need* of playing so well, since all the characters wanted was a convincing *voice recording* of the conversation).

However, this device serves as a potent metaphor, which the movie shares with screwball comedies: it’s all about a romantic couple reinventing their initial desire. We know well that there is nothing more helpful in this than living a life of scheming and/or crime: we know our “Thin Men”, we know our “Bonnies and Clydes”. And, most importantly, we know our “Trouble in Paradise”, because that seems to be the strongest point of reference for Gilroy. Lover’s quarrels are akin to accomplices’ quarrels here - the stakes are both love *and* the spoils.

However, we are far from the wonderfully amoral (and ethereal) universe of Lubitsch. There is a lot of rage in Gilroy’s characters – or maybe they are just truer to life. When Owen has sex with a love-starved office worker in order to get an important code, Robert’s reaction is far from distanced. Her rage and jealousy are violent and manifest themselves in action, not in witty, verbal retribution.

Other debt of Gilroy’s is to Preston Sturges. It’s hard not to think of Joel McCrea’s crazy airport dreams and of Claudette Colbert’s deadpan reactions, when Owen is delivering his “frozen pizza” rant, and Roberts cuts him short by just saying: “I’ve got a job”. Even the gratuitous scene of Owen’s co-spies mock-intimidating him into believing that they doubt his integrity – with both of them finally laughing and patting him on the back – has some Akim Tamiroff quality to it. And needed the lab really to have been located in *Dudwoody*, of all places? It’s pure Sturges, if you ask me.

I remember not liking “Michael Clayton” at first and then growing to like it more (the proofs of my initial reaction are to be found here). But what I also remember was some discussion going on a_film_by about representation of Tilda Swinton’s body – a corporate body no one wants and even the character looks down on. No shots of half-naked, humiliated Roberts here. True, she gets her Jack Lemmon-like lonely dinner scene, but it’s a delicate way of suggesting loneliness of a corporate worker (even such a skilled one as a counterintelligence spy).

Overall, I think this is a successful movie, even though it seriously slumps when its funny MacGuffin (“a new product!”) proves to be a hair-growth shampoo. Suddenly it’s all so flat. What I liked, though, was the last shot of Roberts and Owen shattered by the news of the final reversal of fortune. They’re immobile and dead like the couple buried in the sand in “Un chien andalou” – Gilroy pulls back his camera further and further… and, boom: they take each other’s hands, for the first time in the movie! So many adventures, just to arrive at the “L’Avventura” ending – a woman touching an unfaithful man in a big impersonal space of a hotel, with both of them in a desperate need to start all over. C’est la vie, I guess.

New form of criticism...? ("The Music Man", 1962, DaCosta)

Encouraged by the liberty given only by one's own blog, I decided to post my hommage to what I consider the most enjoyable movie musical of all time, "The Music Man" (1962). The voice belongs to Robert Preston - the rest is yours truly. Enjoy:

The video.

Chill Strikes Out

In Blake Edwards' 10 (1979), a comedy of badly invested lust resulting in goofiness (which now serves as a good metaphor for a decade that was just about to unfold), Dudley Moore says to Brian Dennehy:

MOORE: We are, each of us, a product of an era. That music is my era: beautiful melody and a great lyric. If you were nineteen, and twenty years from now you were dancing with your wife, or girlfriend you knew in high-school, and you said to her: "Darling, they’re playing our song", you know what they’d be playing...? "Why Don't We Do it In the Road". Fucking what kind of era is that?
DENNEHY: To each his own.
MOORE: Now, that's a good song!

Now, 10 is not, strictly speaking, a 1980s movie according to its production certificate, but it is one judging from its spirit. I will come back to this at the end; it will suffice to say now that 1980s seem to be a strange mixture of excitement ("the Bo Derek factor") and dread (the dismay Dudley Moore is describing). No other movie portrays (and embodies) this fatal duality better than Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill (1983). It tells a story of a group of friends who studied and rallied together in 1960s (a time in which the distinction between those activities got blurrier than ever).

Their reunion is funny, painful, violent and anticlimactic (in turns). The reason for the meeting is a funeral of their friend Alex, who took his own life and never makes it to the screen even as a photograph. He’s a blank space that lets all the others form questions and avoid answers, much the same way “Moscow” did in Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters”. In the end, all characters seem transformed a bit, and one character may be pregnant, but there is no doubt that all real change eludes those people, or maybe they shrink from it as a matter of habit.

In an opening funeral speech, the minister asks: “Where did Alex’ hope go?”, and then orders the gathered group: “We must try to regain that hope that must have eluded Alex”. To tell someone to regain their hope is, of course, as effective as to tell someone “to relax”, or “to trust”. Nothing doing. But the characters try it, and so does Kasdan.

As I already mentioned, Alex serves as a convenient blank. Who was he? He had an affair with Sarah (Glenn Close), and his career is described in a funeral speech as a “seemingly random series of occupations”. Harold (Kevin Kline) adds that it was Alex who “drew [the group] together”, and then makes a big claim, according to which “there was something about Alex that was too good for this world”. His favorite song – as played by Karen (JoBeth Williams) during the funeral service – proves to be “You Can’t Always Get what You Want”, which is itself a statement directing us to something beyond possessions or achievements.

Now, was Alex a saint…? Medieval saints – those described in “The Golden Legend”, for example – do not have professions, or they get rid of them, and they wander their paths rather randomly, or so it seems. Saints transform the lives of people around them by questioning who they are and what they are ready to sacrifice – and for what. There’s an explosive potential in this concept, fully explored by Dostoyevsky in “The Idiot” and, to bring us closer to film universe, by Pasolini in Teorema (1968) – which might have inspired Kasdan to have Sarah actually betraying her husband with Alex in the past (sex was the operating mode of Terence Stamp’s saint in Pasolini’s movie, too).

The sequence following the funeral, with a cavalcade of expensive cars moving from the chapel to Harlod & Sarah’s place, plays to an actual “You Can’t Always Get what You Want”, which is kind of ironic, since what you see is a group of people not only possessing most of the things they always wanted, but actually defining themselves by them. “You look fit”, says Harold to Sam (Tom Berenger) – an apprehension made automatically, giving us an idea what set of expectations Harold uses when looking at his fellow men. (Later on Sam will object to using his cashmere sweater to scare off a bat flying in the attic.) On the road from the chapel to the house it’s cars, not people, that seem really speaking to one another (Chloe: “I always wanted to go in a limo”; Michael: “I do half of my work in limos”). Being a Polish viewer, I could not help myself but compare it to Jerzy Skolimowski’s brilliant Hands Up! (Ręce do góry!, 1967/81), in which a group of friends meet in a similar way Kasdan depicts – only they no longer have names, they actually refer to themselves (and to one another) by the brands of their cars.

It’s Willaim Hurt’s Nick who seems to be most sharply aware of how complacent everyone else’s life has become – or at least, he’s the only one who actively rebels against this complacency. He arrives at the funeral and parks his car askew; he’s impotent, and thus out of the game everyone is playing; what’s more – he’s a filmmaker. Not in the sense of being a part of movie industry (for that’s Sam’s role), but in the sense of actually taking a video camera and using it to make some sense out of the experience of his and all the others. Of course, one may wonder to what extent the series of on-camera interviews he holds with his friends inspired Steven Soderbergh, for in six years time he will use the same narrative device – complete with the character’s impotence – in his sex, lies and videotape (1989).

Sam complains about the movie industry: “In L.A., I don’t know who to trust”. He’s an earlier version of a character Steve Martin will play in Kasdan’s Grand Canyon (1991) – he’s a part of the movie industry that corrupts people’s taste, but at least he feels guilty about it (Martin will be a more extreme case: he will feel guilty only for a brief moment, after being almost killed in a robbery). It’s in this character that one finds Kasdan himself, I think – fresh from his massive success of co-scripting some of the most successful movies that defined mass entertainment for decades to come. As good as Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Return of the Jedi (1983) were, Kasdan seems to be saying, they damaged people’s notion of what movies are. Michael (Jeff Goldblum) says: “I should write pieces only as long as for average person to be able to read them through taking an average crap”, and adds that this is no way of reading Dostoyevsky. One might add even more: it’s not a way of watching Bergman, either – and it’s highly doubtful if any of the people we see on screen actually went to see Fanny and Alexander (1982) the previous year. Indiana Jones they know – Harold is whistling John Williams score while hunting for a bat in the attic (thus becoming a living link between two iconic figures of the 1980s entertainment – one already around, and other to be filmed in 1989 by Tim Burton).

“All I want is a little warmth”, Meg’s whispered wish (whispered, it’s worthy of adding, into the ear of an impotent) may be the statement defining Kasdan’s way of moviemaking, as well as his cultural ambition (“[The movie] came from the best possible instincts in my filmmaking life”, as he says in a DVD making-of). The Big Chill, Grand Canyon – it’s precisely amidst all this bigness and grandness (if not of execution, than surely of attempted range) that his movies lose their healthy grip on randomness, and become “overly slick and calculated"* exercises in hope-regaining, to use a phrase discussed earlier. It’s quite telling that Kevin Kline describes Kasdan’s approach as “actively, aggressively humane”**.

Roger Ebert, in his original review of the movie, wrote:

(…) the 1960s [are – M.O.] big in the movies right now because the people who make the movies were students in the 1960s, and (…) the teenagers of 2001 would no doubt be sick and tired of [the current] generation's memories of the olden days of 1983 .

That never happened. We don’t know why. Maybe because 1980s seemed a parody already while happening? (No one felt it better than John Hughes.) It’s quite telling that the most successful plunge into the said decade came with No Country for Old Men (2007) – and then, almost no one noticed, that these were 1980s up there on the screen.

10 ended with Dudley Moore’s not having sex with Bo Derek: not because Derek wasn’t willing, but because she didn’t care for commitment – which is the last thing Moore seemed to lust after, when he indulged in his sultry fantasies of her water-sprinkled body. The big revelation of 10 was that the upcoming decade will probably be torn between eating the cake and keeping away from it. Any sex-fantasy of Bo Derek’s body that ends in maternal arms of Julie Andrews has to be treated as a beacon of a conservative turn, and thus 10 is a good introduction to the chilly 1980s, when fear of emptiness went hand in hand with the echo of the “Indiana Jones Theme".

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* Stephen Prince's phrase.
** In the same making-of documentary I mentioned before.