Duplicity: the title suggests something with two sides, but the film itself, the second (after Michael Clayton) written and directed by Tony Gilroy, has many more layers and facets. Its densely coiled plot and splintered chronology reveal a cascade of familiar genres and styles. It’s a caper movie, a love story — with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, no less — an extra-dry corporate satire. However you describe it, Duplicity is superior entertainment, the most elegantly pleasurable movie of its kind to come around in a very long time.
The kind of movie it seems most obviously to be — the jet-set spy thriller, decorated with eye-candy vistas of London, New York, Dubai and Rome (among other intrigue-ridden spots) — has suffered a bit of an identity crisis since the end of the cold war. Yes, the James Bond franchise soldiers on, but even at the height of Soviet-American brinksmanship, 007 always conducted his tongue-in-cheek operations on the margins of the grand geopolitical chess game, facing down cartoon supervillains rather than KGB alter egos. It was symmetry — two big nations, armed to the teeth, sending brilliant, cynical operatives out to do their shadowy dirty work — that defined the classic spy game in, for instance, the novels of John le Carre. But the current age of asymmetrical, decentralized conflicts has taken some of the fun and the moral complexity out of fictional espionage, on screen and off.
In his scripts for the three vertiginously involuted Bourne movies, Gilroy has tried to restore some of those qualities, building a fascinating puzzle on the meager foundation of Robert Ludlum’s airport doorstops. Duplicity, in the absence of contending, more or less evenly matched superpowers, deploys two multinational corporations, Burkett & Randle and Equikrom, who conduct a steely, ruthless game of proxy battles, psy-ops, counterintelligence and disinformation. Their executives talk the language of grand strategy and total war, and even though their battlefield is the global market for dandruff shampoo, premium diapers and moisturizing creams (or lotions — the distinction apparently matters), nobody regards the stakes as trivial.
The only moment of actual violence in this marvelously tense film, and the only scene of true slapstick in a very funny picture, comes during the opening titles, when the chief executives of the two companies come to blows on a rain-soaked tarmac in front of their corporate jets, seconded by squads of anxious senior vice presidents. I could have watched their flailing, sputtering fisticuffs, played in slow motion with the sound drained away, for at least two hours, imagining any number of real-life CEOs in place of Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson, who play the two angry captains of industry. Even if the rest of Duplicity had fizzled, it would be worth seeing for that sequence alone.
Happily, the movie effervesces instead. The epic struggle between Burkett & Randle and Equikrom is, in a way, a global-capitalism red herring, the scaffolding for a different, more intimate sort of combat. If what thrills you is the swift-moving, unrelenting contest between equal and opposing forces, then the movies you seek out are surely the great romantic comedies of the studio era, verbal boxing matches that draw blood and end in kisses. And you have to go back that far — to the glory days of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, let’s say — to find a duel of sharp wits, hidden agendas and simmering desires as satisfying as what transpires between Julia Roberts and Clive Owen.
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