Review- Duplicity

Tony Gilroy has made a mark as a writer-director who brings old-fashioned values back to cinema. So it’s not surprising that he named his female lead in Duplicity, “Stenwick.”  The surprise is that he thought Julia Roberts could bring the kind of steely complexity that Barbara Stanwyck brought to her great film noir roles. In a film that relies on chemistry to drive it forward, Roberts and her co-star, Clive Owen, threaten several times to bring the movie to a screeching halt. Their exchanges don’t have the poetry, the charm or the danger of great screen couples.
    Part of this is the story’s fault. Roberts and Owen play romantically entangled, former government spies who are now hired guns for corporate America. They team up to scam a corporation out of a few million dollars. And Gilroy hops around in time to show the hatching of the plot as well as the execution. Along the way, Gilroy keeps us guessing about the couple’s intentions: Do they really love each other? Are they setting up a nasty double-cross? Will Owen pull off his Mission-Impossible style mask and reveal Tom Cruise underneath?
    But instead of being tense and witty, these scenes are sleepy and pedestrian. You don’t really know who Stenwick and Jon Koval (Owen) are, and you really don’t care. Owen looks every inch a Bond, but the pair turn into the Bickersons when they share the screen.
    The movie’s first couple needs some of the crackle and pop Gilroy sprinkles (however stingily) through the rest of the movie. For example: the opening scene, a slow-motion brawl between the two CEOs (played by Tom Wilkerson and Paul Giamatti) who are at the center of the scam. This warring pair is worth watching. With deft and economical touches, Gilroy and his actors sketch terrific larger-than-life pillars of corporate power. Wilkerson is the Sun-Tzu guru. He occupies a vast office with only a Bonzai tree and a marble-slab desk that seems to float in mid-air, and you can tell he’s probably a member of Skull and Bones, plays polo and collects $1,000-a-bottle Bordeaux’s. By contract, Giamatti is the boorish and scrappy middle-American, paranoid and intense (he’s probably got a bottle of Pepto in his desk drawer).
    With this pair taking center stage, Duplicity is more a satire of corporate America (and a well-timed one, at that) than caper movie (or romantic comedy). As he demonstrated in Michael Clayton, Gilroy has a sharp, no-nonsense eye for great storytelling. He just has to be a little more careful about his choice of movie stars.