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A R O U N D T O W N 發光的城市 17 TAIPEI TIMES • FRIDAY, JUNE 5, 2009 The duplicity of ‘Duplicity’ Julia Roberts and Clive Owen’s battle of wits, intrigue and desire harkens to the glory days of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant BY A. O. SCOTT disinformation. Their executives talk becue, a crackle of sexual tension ignites NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK the language of grand strategy and total between them. Duplicity: the title suggests something war, and even though their battlefield is “Are you always like this?” she asks, with two sides, but the film itself, the the global market for dandruff sham- responding to pickup lines that sound as second (after Michael Clayton) writ- poo, premium diapers and moisturizing if they were memorized from a feature ten and directed by Tony Gilroy, has creams (or lotions — the distinction in Maxim. many more layers and facets. Its densely apparently matters), nobody regards the “No,” he confesses. “I sometimes coiled plot and splintered chronology stakes as trivial. act like this, but this is completely reveal a cascade of familiar genres and The only moment of actual violence different.” styles. It’s a caper movie, a love story in this marvelously tense film, and the And so he charms her into bed — with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, only scene of true slapstick in a very — or rather, falls into the honey trap no less — an extra-dry corporate satire. funny picture, comes during the open- she has rigged just by standing around However you describe it, Duplicity ing titles, when the chief executives of the garden in a flowery dress, looking is superior entertainment, the most the two companies come to blows on bored. She — Claire is what she’s called, elegantly pleasurable movie of its kind a rain-soaked tarmac in front of their though who knows if it’s her real name to come around in a very long time. corporate jets, seconded by squads of — is CIA; he — we’ll call him Ray — is The kind of movie it seems most anxious senior vice presidents. I could MI6. Apparently they’re not on the same obviously to be — the jet-set spy thriller, have watched their flailing, sputtering side, but that’s a minor political detail in decorated with eye-candy vistas of fisticuffs, played in slow motion with which the movie has no further concern. London, New York, Dubai and Rome the sound drained away, for at least two The point of Claire’s initial double (among other intrigue-ridden spots) hours, imagining any number of real-life cross is to map out the intersection of — has suffered a bit of an identity crisis CEOs in place of Paul Giamatti and her and Ray’s professional and sexual Roberts has almost entirely left behind Julia Roberts and Clive Owen star in Duplicity, directed by Tony Gilroy. PHOTO: BLOOMBERG since the end of the cold war. Yes, the Tom Wilkinson, who play the two angry interests. He is burned, humiliated, the coltish, America’s-sweetheart man- James Bond franchise soldiers on, but captains of industry. Even if the rest of unmanned — and totally smitten. What nerisms, except when she uses them even at the height of Soviet-American Duplicity had fizzled, it would be worth follows between them is perhaps his strategically, to disarm or confuse. brinksmanship, 007 always conducted seeing for that sequence alone. revenge, perhaps her repentance and Curvier than she used to be and with a his tongue-in-cheek operations on the Happily, the movie effervesces maybe her second act. He was so easy to touch of weariness around her eyes and margins of the grand geopolitical chess instead. The epic struggle between fool the first time, after all. impatience in her voice, she is, at 41, game, facing down cartoon supervillains Burkett & Randle and Equikrom is, in a Five years after that first, ambiguous umistakably in her prime. rather than KGB alter egos. It was sym- way, a global-capitalism red herring, the roll in the hay, Claire and Ray, retired Gilroy’s most ingenious structural metry — two big nations, armed to the scaffolding for a different, more intimate from government work, are embroiled gamble — the duplicity of Duplicity teeth, sending brilliant, cynical opera- sort of combat. If what thrills you is in the Burkett-Equikrom war. A series — is to make foreground and back- tives out to do their shadowy dirty work the swift-moving, unrelenting contest of flashbacks establishes that they are ground almost perfectly reversible. It’s DUPLICITY — that defined the classic spy game in, between equal and opposing forces, then working together, but the point of each a sharp, sexy comedy masquerading as for instance, the novels of John le Carre. the movies you seek out are surely the of those scenes, which bring us closer a twisty tale of intrigue, and vice versa. DIRECTED BY: TONY GILROY But the current age of asymmetrical, great romantic comedies of the studio to the present (via London, Miami and And as soon as you grow impatient with decentralized conflicts has taken some era, verbal boxing matches that draw Cleveland), is to make us wonder which the pre- or postcoital repartee of Roberts STARRING: JULIA ROBERTS (CLAIRE STENWICK), CLIVE OWEN (RAY KOVAL), TOM of the fun and the moral complexity out blood and end in kisses. And you have is playing the other. Or even, hard as and Owen, a nimble army of support- WILKINSON (HOWARD TULLY), PAUL GIAMATTI (RICHARD GARSIK), DENIS O’Hare of fictional espionage, on screen and off. to go back that far — to the glory days it may be for Ray or Claire or anyone ing players comes forward to deliver (DUKE MONAHAN), KATHLEEN CHALFANT (PAM FRALES), TOM MCCARTHY (JEFF In his scripts for the three vertigi- of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, else to believe, whether their allegiance, Gilroy’s mordantly funny dialogue with BAUER), CARRIE PRESTON (BARBARA BOFFERD) AND RICK WORTHY (DALE RAIMES) nously involuted Bourne movies, Gilroy let’s say — to find a duel of sharp wits, rooted in lust, greed and maybe some- perfectly straight faces. has tried to restore some of those hidden agendas and simmering desires thing more, is sincere and aboveboard Giamatti and Wilkinson are a per- RUNNING TIME: 125 MINUTES qualities, building a fascinating puzzle as satisfying as what transpires between after all. fectly mismatched set, embodying differ- on the meager foundation of Robert Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. Along the way, Owen, on whom a ent styles of corporate arrogance, while TAIWAN RELEASE: TODAY Ludlum’s airport doorstops. Duplic- The two of them failed to gener- two-piece suit becomes as brazenly their underlings and enforcers (notably ity, in the absence of contending, more ate much of a spark in Mike Nichols’s sexual a uniform as anything you can Denis O’Hare, Kathleen Chalfant, Tom or less evenly matched superpowers, Closer, but that was surely because the imagine, opens many bottles of Cham- McCarthy and Rick Worthy) display deploys two multinational corporations, atmosphere in that somber little cham- pagne and looks hungrily at Roberts, the varieties of sycophancy, treachery, Burkett & Randle and Equikrom, who ber piece was too damp. Here, from the even though Claire is more of a natural vanity and incompetence found in every conduct a steely, ruthless game of proxy moment they meet, sipping frozen drinks predator than Ray. For this film, her cubicle farm, ever so slightly heightened battles, psy-ops, counterintelligence and at a Middle Eastern Fourth of July bar- first real starring role in quite a while, for comic and suspenseful effect. (Carrie .

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