Duplicity: Spy Versus Spy Romance Delivers The Goods

The period between the December/January's "serious" movies and the start of the May blockbuster season is usually the most cinematically dead. February, March, and April are typically filled with studio flops being dumped, formulaic thrillers, and second-tier comedy yuk fests, with maybe an odd Watchmen or two.

Which is why finding a well done, entertaining spy dramedy like Duplicity is so nice. With Julia Roberts as Ms. Spy plying her trade against Clive Owen's Mr Spy, Tony Gilroy's Duplicity delivers a nice, entertaining thriller of corporate espionage, head games, and heist romance that sends us to delicious locations (like Rome, Miami, and Cleveland) and delivers both the witty banter and well-designed ending that the best counter-intelligence plots achieve. You might call this film "Ocean's Two," and reducing the complicated motives and plots to just two characters tightens the story and heightens the drama.

What gets us off on just the right footing is that when Roberts's Clair meets Owens' Ray, they are both government spies employed by competing governments, and she's in the middle of taking him for a ride in order to steal the secret papers he's carrying with him. That initial moment of distrust becomes both a romantic barrier and a personal code for them throughout the rest of the story. The next time we see the two encounter each other, its five years later - and it turns out they are both working for the same company. Or are they? As flashbacks fill in what we've missed, we learn that the two may or may not have fallen in love, and may or may not have hatched a plot to take advantage of the corporate rivalry between two macho capitalist barons of fiercely competing consumer personal care product companies: Tom Wilkinson's Howard Tully and Paul Giamatti's Richard Garsik.

The fact that we don't quite know whether the two are gaming each other as well as their bosses keeps us on our toes while we try to unravel the plot that they might have hatched. On top of that, both Wilkinson and Giamatti deliver delicious over-the-top performances that let us begin to understand that Claire and Ray aren't the only ones playing deceptive, hard-ball shenanigans. What we come to understand: Garsik is ambitious, vain, and vainglorious. Tully is egomaniacle, paranoid, and vengeful. And both men are hyper competitive animals. Naturally, these failings let them fall right into the trap - set for them by Claire and Ray? or by someone else? - as the plot beings to thicken.

I also think that both Roberts and Owens give better performances than we've seen from either in quite a while. Roberts has one fantastically funny scene where she's sent to interrogate the office worker that Owens has just seduced, and plays the undercover schtick with hilarious aloofness. Meanwhile, Owens actually seems charming as he delivers pick-up banter that turns out to not only be well rehearsed, but carefully plotted as well.

That's why the duplicity here has the delicious complication of a movie like Mamet's The Game, but goes beyond Mamet's film to add an important sense of passion. There's a nice chemistry between Roberts and Owens that makes us believe that these two could be both fascinated and potentially burned by each other. Like their corporate counterparts, the two are driven by one overriding basic motivation: Greed.This is the Greed of being an American, the kind who wants that one big payday so we can retire to 500-thread count sheets in Rome. So we all understand each other. But these characters are destined to find something more valuable than their payday, and that's what's so nice about how the film unwinds - by the time Claire and Ray get past their distrust to fall in love with each other, we've fallen in love with them, faults and all, and we feel they get the reward they deserve.

It's also nice that someone else in the film learns to appreciate them as well. Not everything is as it seems, in this fine movie. And that's what makes learning about new people like Claire, Ray, Tully, and Garsik so romantic: what we fall in love with most are the people who can surprise us.

The International: Bank Thriller Suffers from Lack of Leverage

In The International, Clive Owen and Naomi Watts star as a pair of law enforcement offers (one Interpol, one NY DOA) hot on the trail of a criminal international bank.

The movie, which seems to have been held back from its original release date and has received scant notice in theaters, may be suffering from having been overtaken by recent events. Nothing in this film about a very very very bad bank is no where as dramatic as the bad banks that Geithner and Obama seem to be dealing with every day.

However, for the sake of movie analysis, let's put all this aside and deal with the movie on its own terms: a cinematic story, much like The Constant Gardener, based on a real-life banking conspiracy that explores a high-finance, international critical criminal issue under the rubric of an action thriller. This is a perfectly acceptably plotted, well directed, well acted thriller about tracking down a murderous, international banking conspiracy, and yet, for some reason, the movie never quite achieves that certain something that most good movies need to really draw you in.

I could point out a number of culprits: while the cold steel & glass architecture where most of this takes place is quite impressive as sculpture, the steel gray cinematography and the sterile environments give the movie a cold sheen that seems distant and drab. The movie peels back layers upon layers of conspiracy only, really, to arrive at a kind of vague corporate oligarchy, where there are very ill-defined bad guys who we are never given any information about, or a real chance to hate. The detective work here begins to take on the excitement of a tax audit, only without any actual figures to review. Clive Owen's inspector Salinger character is the typical cop working around the system, but his protestations and flame-outs seem more stock than character driven. And when the real confrontation happens in the movie - in which a critical character must be turned - the dialogue devolves into a banter of empty cliches, and the character gives in without any real reason or motivation. If only LA Police Chief Brenda Johnson on "The Closer" had interrogations this easy. And this all happens about twenty minutes before the movie ends...leaving the rest of the film to hang flat.

On the other hand, the movie has one great scene involving The Guggenheim Museum that was truly Hitchcock inspired. The hired hit man here also turns out to be one of the films best characters. The postmodern artwork in the museum gives the scene the perfect thematic punch, just the way Hitchcock would have done (it seems to say, just as postmodern art deals in recycled imagery, banks deal in recycled obligation). I guess that shows that if you're going to steal, steal from the best. If only the rest of the movie had that same energy, that kind of resonance, and that same sense of character, I'd be recommending it. Unfortunately, aside from this scene, everything else in the film feels phoned in.

So while there's nothing really terrible about this movie, there's not enough here to recommend it. Perhaps one day if it's on TV, and the banking crisis seems long ago, you might watch this film and wonder - how could it have been that people ever imagined that banks were powerful.