Duplicity

This is an M.C. Escher kind of flick: your mind fits the pieces together a certain way and then there’s an ah-ha moment where another set of pieces appears unbidden out of nowhere. “Duplicity” uses a similar strategy to spin, tangle and resolve a middling, mish-mosh of a tale about two CIA agents who quit the service to make some real money by stealing the formula for curing baldness. No question the film delivers on its title. This viewer felt strapped into a kayak slicing deftly through the rapids of what’s what? and who’s who? until my internal compass got washed overboard, true north and all.

Our protagonists, played by Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, are street smart, terminally suspicious former agents. After the requisite turf pissing contests, they notice that they are perfect fencing partners in the art of barbed repartee, the prelude to a kiss in the action/adventure genre. There are some intelligent, sharp-edged exchanges between them that evoked Tracey and Hepburn. This was arguably the high point of the film for me, although Julia was leaden in her role, not sleek, and the chemistry with Clive seemed scripted, not stirred.

Eventually, the agents fall in love as madly as two people can who suspect that the other one is just gaming them for some unknown objective. Mistrust and/or ambition tear them apart, and then longing and/or exhaustion bring them back together. The thought crossed my mind that maybe they are both being conned as part of a larger game that neither of them knows about. Or maybe that’s just what director Tony Gilroy (“Michael Clayton”) wants us to think. And so it goes.

On the one hand, it’s comforting to know that secret agents are as vulnerable and bumbling as the rest of us in the clandestine affairs of the heart. On the other hand, it’s a little scary to know that those who once defended our nation from the bad guys are pretty easily tripped up by their own emotions. Where’s James Bond when we really need him? Nothing fazed Bond, not men with gold fingers or women with pussy galore. He lived in an aura of chic, technological invincibility, never shaken or stirred by fear or love. “Duplicity” is a kind of white flag waved at the Bond era and its triumphalist mythology. Alas, them days is gone.

The premise that secret agents jump from a team fighting for the survival of Western civilization to one seeking to make obscene profits by growing hair on busy streets is, I hope, absurd and sad enough to qualify as satire. Paul Giamatti, who plays the CEO of the company with the new product, does a fine caricature of an exuberantly amoral CEO, a glib, well-dressed huckster like Adam Eckhardt in “Thank You for Not Smoking.” Giamatti’s character is almost sexually aroused about the idea of making a killing on a product that (like all previous baldness cures) won’t actually work. But he’s most passionate about sticking it to his arch corporate rival (played with understated intensity by the always excellent Tom Wilkinson) whom he fears will get to market with the same product before he does. And so it goes.

I think part of the problem with “Duplicity” was that it wasn’t sure whether it was a social satire or a spy story or a love story, so it tried to be all three at once and didn’t have the narrative chops to keep it all in focus. It wasn’t the games within games that got me, or the duplicity either. It just wasn’t done very well. I wanted something I could sink my teeth into and this was soup. I am left somehow knowing that the world will not end in a bang or a whimper but in duplicity. Of course, if it’s done well, we won’t even know it happened.