DUPLICITY (Tony Gilroy 2009)

[Chris Knipp]

Tony Gilroy: DUPLICITY (2009)

No, I'm not of two minds any more. This is a disappointment.

Review by Chris Knipp

I'm of two minds about Tony Gilroy's latest extravaganza, which he both wrote and directed. On the one hand it's beautiful and clever. On the other hand, it's brittle and confusing. For all its accomplishment, this films suffers by comparison with Gilroy's previous triumphs, the Bourne adventures and his last movie, Michael Clayton. No; I'm not of two minds any more. Duplicity is a disappointment. It's too pretty and too clever for its own good: it's essentially empty. There's nobody in it you care about.

Michael Clayton was a corporate legal thriller. In it, a giant conglomerate was caught doing very bad things (like poisoning the environment and killing people) and people were willing to take great risks to fight back. You did care about Clayton, George Clooney's conflicted, tarnished legal "fixer" character. He was partly broken but still charismatic. You cared about him very much. He had a family, a real back story. And the main people he had to deal with, played by Tom Wilkinson and Tilda Swinton, were complex and interesting and you also cared about them. Duplicity's headliners deliver star turns, but they remain colorful, glamorous ciphers.

This time, there are two kinds of sparring going on. Two companies are at war (in business, it's called "competition"), stealing and concealing their most profitable product secrets, and a man and a woman, both experienced spies, have joined that corporate war to make a pack of money. They're also not just incidentally engaged in amorous combat with each other from their first meeting, five years ago, in sunny Dubai. (The film will shift back and forth in time until you get hopelessly confused. The convolution of the structure caused Spielberg and Tom Cruise to drop interest in the project, and that's why Gilroy wound up doing it himself.) A central conceit is that all couples distrust each other but Ray (Clive Owen) and Claire (Julia Roberts) just admit it, because as professional spies they've been conditioned to be on their guard in all situations. The film's running question of whether Claire and Ray are somehow in love or are just "playing" each other: does it really matter? Anyway the film goes back and forth on this issue so often I gave up trying to guess. Besides, it's a really silly question. Ray is another variation on the James Bond character and his relationships with women are just expensive, champagne flirtations. There could be a little more real connection if the actors were actual spouses, as is the case with Brad and Angelina in Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

Reading D.T. Max's article (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/16/090316fa_fact_max) about Gilroy and this movie in The New Yorker last week didn't help things, for me. Max dwelt on how many takes Gilroy made, and how many little changes in lines. Over and over he shot a sequence in Rome where Julia looks over her shoulder as some little boys play with a ball, seeking just the right energy from the kids and the perfect ambiguity in the look. I'm sorry, but in the movie itself that shot flits by without making much of an impression. Likewise the last line in the film, endlessly tweaked, which ends up as "Sounds like a plan." Or something. It's such a cliche'. Does the wording really matter? The film and our attention are fading at that point. Gilroy's expensive concern with alternate takes bespeaks not so much dedication to craft as the baroque toying with trifles of an artist who's lost his way in detail.

More damning still is Max's description of Gilroy's emphasis on "reversals." He seeks to surprise us, we're told, shake us out of our expectations. Any filmmaker who plays around with conventional genres does that, of course, but "reversals" can get so out of hand you don't care about the outcome any more, and that happens in Duplicity. Max's article just made that more clear to me. There's a pivotal scene where Ray meets up with Claire and calls her on the Dubai incident, when she drugged him and stole some secret documents, and now she tries to pretend they've never met. This scene is replayed with variations so many times you lose count. What's going on? Is it a fantasy? Is somebody lying? Or was the film so clumsily edited old alternative takes were left in somewhere else? Of course you know the latter could not be the case, but that the thought occurs to you, even subliminally, is a fatal sign that the ingenuity for its own sake has gotten out of hand.

Likewise Gilroy makes frequent use of the multiple panel device, where four or five location shots appear on the screen in separate frames simultaneously, underlining the complexity of the machinations going on among the warring CEO's and the amorous spies. The only trouble is, you can't figure out what these locations are--except that, God help us, one of them must be Cleveland! Cleveland and someplace in the south where there's an industrial space vie for attention with Switzerland, Manhattan, and Rome. Ray and Claire shack up in suites so luxurious and huge they look more like new wings of the Met. Duplicity wallows in glamor.

It misuses its great character actors, Wilkinson (again, but neutered) and Paul Giamatti (shrill), as the two opposing CEO's. It is disappointing to find that Wilkinson can be uninteresting, if given a flat role. Giamatti emerged as a very fine character actor with American Spendor and Sideways. After a lot of plummy roles (and still some good performances) his work now seems pushed. Maybe he's just too good a loser to be convincing as a ferociously ambitious executive. With Giamatti's climactic scene the movie slips into self-parody. And then when the twenty-seven-million-dollar super-colossal concluding reversal comes, somebody looks silly, but is it the film's chosen victim, or us for being taken in by this high-gloss shuck and jive?

[cinemabon]

As a writer, the use of the flashback has many purposes. However, one is not to confuse the reader with too much subplot. Mainly the flashback illustrates qualities about the principle characters that adds to their depth. I've noticed a trend in storytelling lately that adds more to confusion than clarity - to run a series of foreward flashbacks as a way to tell a story. This can work in a film like "Memento" where flashbacks play a key role in gradually revealing key plot points and character development. It sort of works with "The Reader" as well, although at times the jumping forward and back can be confusing as was the case recently in "Seven Pounds." The same plot structure is tried here and fails, as it serves not to reveal some key element in the mystery, but rather a series of "cool" scenes which have no purpose other than the main characters had a good time here or there.

In other words, they do not add any reveal that a good scene could handle with just a few shots instead of the endless dragging us from Rome to London to Cleveland and God knows where else, screwing and drinking champagne. Even the "bug" subplot has no point unless the main characters knew and used that to their benefit. Instead, they act as though it doesn't matter (when later it is a bug that is their undoing?). Even the oldest Bond film has the man "sweep the room" for bugs. If they were in the intelligence business, they would know to do that, wouldn't they?

In "Duplicity" Gilroy attempts to help us understand the relationship between Ray (Clive Owen) and Clair (Julia Roberts) by using some clever reveals during flashbacks. The only problem arises in that these never amount to anything. Two thirds the way through the film, we're left with a "so what?" attitude when the plot about the clever spies amounts to nothing. It turns out they are not as intelligent as we are made to feel. I never understood the opening sequence either, in which the two rivals during a riotous and hilarious slow motion scene, attack one another on the tarmac. Later we understand they are rivals, but what has this to do with anything? Are we to understand that the plot of the movie is nothing but a revenge by the one chief executive that goes back to the first incident of the film?

I found several people making negative comments about the flip-flopping time sequences, the lack of a satisfying ending and the appalling sense that the whole experience (those of the characters in the film and the audience included) had a waste of time.

[Chris Knipp]

This expands very nicely on a very important reason why the movie finally isn't satisfactory. I overlooked the opening slo-mo sequence. Indeed it doesn't quite compute (just as, as you say, the spies do things that professional spies would never do). That intro could come before or after the main events. Influences that may have led to excess in flashback use might also include the very tircky David Mamet and also THE USUAL SUSPECTS, and definitely PULP FICTION. The disappointment of DUPLICITY is heightened because (as somebody is quoted as saying in the New Yorker article) in many ways Gilroy is at the top of his game; it's such a smooth, beautiful-looking film, and if the characgters of Ray and Claire were ehanced instead of undercut by the flashbacks, their relationship could be really fun. I think Julia and Clive are likeable in the movie and work well together. But it's all spoiled. I didn't go much into the plot because, first of all, I don't want to be accused of spoilers, and, second, the plot complexities and the holes in them are so numerous you don't know where to begin. I'm sure blogs willl go into a lot of detail, and IMDb Boards.

[cinemabon]

I can't help but wondering that there is a good movie here covered by a convoluted plot whose meaning never came across to the audience.

I've heard several people mention "The Sting" associated with this film. While that would be repetitious, it would certainly make more sense than what we have here. If only the filmmakers have kept it cute instead of clever. They smarted themselves out of understanding.

[Chris Knipp]

My presumption also is that DUPLICITY might have been much more successful if its excesses had been removed. I don't know about cute, but it is too clever. And the clevernewss gets in the way of the kind of humanness you get in the MICHAEL CLAYTON characters. A movie founded on trickery is on slippery ground.

[tabuno]

Chris Knipp's commentary is surprising because his preferences for a quality movie sound similar a Hollywood audience appeal standards:

Care about characters - the simplistic good versus evil plot.

The part that I did enjoy about this movie was the "cipher characters" making the personalities geniunely different and intriguing and in some ways highlighting the very essence of espionage movies. What failed wasn't that we didn't like the characters, it was that the director attempted to play it too safe for mass audience approval and using an "Ocean's 11" style of cinematography. This movie could have really been dynamite as a serious espionage thriller if it had been played that way, not some beautifully cute, warm, fuzzy cared about characters.

I've been very critical about flashbacks in almost all the movies I've seen last year, and this movie however is an exception. This movie needed these flashbacks because it was inherent in the plot and required the deception, duplicity angle of the movie as things aren't what they seem to be. I was able to keep a decent sense of what was going on - just like a good mystery, the clues and changing circumstance made this movie all the more delicious. For me for those who had problems with the flashbacks, are possibly more due to laziness and a desire to have a movie served conveniently on one's plate without having to do any mental work. But this is a duplicity movie not some romantic, brainless comedy. This movie requires attention and concentration, not just sitting back enjoying the flavors and visuals of foreign places.

What ruined this movie was its insistance on being too mainstream, too populist in its approach because inherently the nature of the movie wasn't. It was supposed to be gritty, hard-driven, nasty - like a Japanese corporate mafia to the death movie. Instead from the beginning it was played more like parody and light, entertaining froth that really masked the more dramatic, serious nature of the movie. Instead of turning people off, being a "nice" movie in actuality turned people away. If the movie only had been more hard-hitting and serious, it would have played like the older black and white movies - "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" or "The Ipcress Files."

[Chris Knipp]

The point we have in common on DUPLICITY is that we'd like it to have been more serous. I don't see though why it couldn't be a tough mafioso thriller and be "mainstream" or "pppulist in its approach." So I'm not sure about all the terms or values you're holding up here. You say the flashbacks are necessary, but where you see complexity I see just trickery, and when you can't put the pieces of the puzzle together then the game doesn't work. But I'd definitely agree that this is not as good as THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD or THE IPCRESS FILES.

[tabuno]

Kate Winslet's character in "The Reader" (2008) is a much more complex character which is both appealing and repulsive. Popular movies seem to focus more on two-dimensional characters to make it much more easy for the audience to enjoy the movie without having to really think or become overly uncomfortable with ther characters, especially those that we are supposed to support and hope for the best while watching the movie.

Perhaps the most successful popular movie that presents a much more conflicted personality is Hannibal Lector, though Anthony Hopkins portrayal still seems overly done when compared to Brian Cox's more subtle and perhaps authentic version of the evil doctor. One of the more overlooked characterizations of ambivalent characters are those performed by Kevin Costner who has developed an art for being a tortured, imperfect soul as in "The Post Man" (1997). Yet even most of his performances haven't been widely embraced by the popular mainstream. "Kill Bill" also presents conflicted good/evil personalities that are both repulsive and charming or even "Dr. Zhivago" with a cast of good/bad characters that have affairs, transform themselves into revolutionaries who still has a heart. Nicole Kidman's character in "Margot at the Wedding" is another good example of radiant performances that offers more geniune personality and still is compelling to watch.

It takes a great script, director, and actor to be able to really generate the deeply moving complex character-driven movie unlike so much popular, mainstream movies. In other words, we don't need to have romantic comedy/action thriller with nice characters as in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" to achieve a strong and appealing movie. We care about the characters more on the basis of some more nebulous basis than simple caring personality. In "Duplicity" the director and script took the characters into a fun, cute, manipulative world of espionage which in reality had much more ruthless and serious intent. We don't necessarily need to like these characters in order to experience the drama of how they perhaps all self-deconstruct in some form of retributive justice or not.

[Chris Knipp]

That's all very interesting but I'm not sure what bearing it has on DUPLICITY or its characters, who obviously are somewhat ambiguous in the case of Ray and Claire, but not complexly evil, nor need they be. I don't think we have to throw the book at DUPLICITY to see what's going on with the chararacters or to evaluate its success.

It's not a bad movie at all. I just find it disappointing, as some do, because it doesn't lives up to the expecations aroused by MICHAEL CLAYTON, which Tony Gilroy also wrote and directed, and the latter BOURNE movies, which he wrote. Undoubtedly, by the way, DUPLICITY shows some BOURNE influence in its grandiouse use of locations and its breathless movement.

THE NEW YORKER has a good description of what's going on in DUPLICITY genre- and tone-wise:
An enormously enjoyable hybrid, a romantic comedy set at the center of a caper movie. But the froth arrives with steel bubbles--the tone is amused and mordantly satirical. That's true, but as cinemabon agreed the movie's over-trickiness spoiles the fun by confusing us just one or two flashbacks too far. The whole trouble, as that article by D.T. Max shows, is that Girroy has reached the point of being too much in love with his own cleverness and skill in multiplying surprise "reversals," scenario-writing devices that must be used sparingly to keep them effective.

[tabuno]

I agree with flashback over use in too many movies nowadays. I just felt that the nature of the duplicity in this movie seemed to lend itself to the flashback subterfuge, especially as many movies don't have an opportunity to incorporate into their script due to the nature of the plot and subject matter. I really mentally focused and worked this movie in order to keep track of what was going on and I began to feel the suspicion and the difficulty of trust and apparently interfered with ever forming a true relationship, something not really dealt with in most espionage movies. It was really unfortunate that this movie wasn't directed in a different way. It had potential to go in a refreshing new direction for this movie genre.

While this movie was "ok," it really was spoiled by its attempt to play it safe in my view and attempted to cater to a more fun loving mass audience mentality that, as you implied in your first post, we must really "care" about these characters if we are to enjoy this movie.

[cinemabon]

I don't believe I was lost in following the plot. On the contrary, I found the plot all too easy to follow. However, I found Gilroy's script lacking a point. I understand the hatred between the two rival company heads. I did not understand how the attack in the opening credits (which I found extremely amusing with the edits timed to the music in slow motion) related to the scene before it or any that followed. And what did Julia Robert's comment mean when she said "this goes way back"? Was she referring to the open scene or to her eventual betrayal which her boss could not detect until Ray took his New York apartment three weeks before the job? How could two spies with such long historys in their agencies billed as so intelligent and so clever miss being bugged? Didn't she see the man on the floor with the obvious open envelope and formula in front of him as a set up? Suspicious spies know better than to trust the word of someone else. Too many unanswered questions muddled by too many flashbacks with too many cute little quips at the end to wrap it all up in a neat bundle of explanations. I didn't buy it.

As Chris so clearly pointed out above, while Gilroy tried to fill the frame with details, he left out the big picture... to clearly tell the story. Either this is a potboiler or a comedy. Trying to make the film a romantic comedy mixed in with a heavy spy thriller misses both marks. As the audience, we are not suppose to "figure out" the mess. The filmmaker is suppose to present it in a way we should easily understand. After all, he is supposed to be telling a story, not creating an artistic enigma for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[Chris Knipp]

tabuno, when I talked about characters you "care about" that was another way of saying characters who are three-dimensional, who have some depth. This can apply equally to characters you like or to ones you don't. Of course there's nothing wrong with flashbacks per se, though as cinemabon was saying, they shouldn't be used when the same information can be conveyed just as effectively in a simple real time scene. The flashbacks in DUPLICITY, not a mistake in themselves, are used to trick and confuse the audience rather than to add depth to the characters. Whether it would be better for the mood to be light and frothy or deadly serious in DUPLICITY is another issue that I haven't taken a stand on. cinemabon says
Trying to make the film a romantic comedy mixed in with a heavy spy thriller misses both marks. Maybe he's right, or maybe Denby of THE NEW YORKER is right in saying the movie is an "enormously enjoyable hybrid." But where we all can agree is that as cinemabon says DUPLICITY leaves us with
"Too many unanswered questions muddled by too many flashbacks with too many cute little quips at the end to wrap it all up in a neat bundle of explanations. " By the standards of the BOND movies, the frothy, deliberately unrealistic thriller, DUPLICITY isn't enough fun because it spends too much time mystifying us. By the standards of BOURNE or the John Le Carre realistic, moody British spy movies, DUPLICITY hasn't enough depth or conviction, apart from the fact that its plot has too many holes. But it's still as tabuno says "ok," in fact it's more than okay, and that's why it's frustrating: you can't help thinking it might have been really good as a mainstream thriller, like MICHAEL CLAYTON.

[tabuno]

Chris Knipp - I like your "caring" description. I'm with you.

What I liked about the flashbacks in this movie is that IT IS important to have the past recreations for this type of movie because the audience gets to re-experience the flavor, the context, the actual behavior of duplicity or authenticity (we are not sure which) and the art of deception to the level where the whole notion of mistrust is engrained into the audience experience. Trying to have brief explanations in real time wouldn't work and really defeats the purpose of this movie. I would say that your idea of real time scenes would actually be the lazy approach to this film.

[Chris Knipp]

Of course it's more effort to shoot a flashback than just a bit of real-time dialogue, but not that much more. "Lazy" doesn't really have much to do with it. Even a film shot on a shoestring (like EN TU AUSENCIA, which I just described in the LAST FILM I'VE SEEN thread) can have plenty of flashbacks.

cinemabon is right that we know basically what went on in DUPLICITY when it draws to a close. And I'll grant you that the flashbacks provide Ray and Claire with a history together and fill in atmosphere. But those "Do I know you?" scenes are deliberately multiplied to baffle and confound us, surely everybody has to see that. So we wind up not just understanding the role of mistrust in the relationship but ourselves distrusting the characters and the movie itself, down the line, and feeling we're just being toyed with.

[tabuno]

There's a fine line between being duped as this is what the movie was all about and feeling duped as being manipulated and feeling bad about it. In some ways the comment:

"So we wind up not just understanding the role of mistrust in the relationship but ourselves distrusting the characters and the movie itself, down the line, and feeling we're just being toyed with."

can be taken as a positive commentary in that this movie actually succeeded in re-creating in real life the very essence of what this movie at its core represented - duplicity. It was just that it was handled wrong. It was like trying to create a great salad dressing with oil and water but forgetting to shake it up so that it didn't separate. The style and tone of the movie just didn't go with the nature of the script and subject matter.

[Chris Knipp]

It's a fine line, good point. There are a lot of things wrong with this movie. And yet it's very polished. Hence, the frustration we feel that it doesn't work as well as it might have done.

[cinemabon]

This argument takes us back to films similar to "The Sting" and "Ocean's Eleven" where the flashback helps to form the ongoing story by revealing qualities about the characters. Only in those films, we are purposely misled to believe one thing when another is true. The "ah-ha!" or reveal moment comes at the end when we discover that the partial concealments have a purpose. The FBI agent is really a con man and so forth. "Oh, now I get it!"

That is not the case with "Duplicity" the very nature of the word means to be deceitful in a "double dealing" sort of way. The characters state this in the very beginning. However, we never understand who Claire is really working for in the very first scene. We are led to believe she is working for the CIA and Ray is working for MI6 out of England. Yet, she makes a statement later about stealing industrial secrets. In the scene that follows, because of its juxtaposition, we then conclude, perhaps wrongly, that each spy is working for rival security firms. This is where the confusion for me lies. The flashbacks only served to compound on my confusion regarding who is spying on whom. This is why I found the ending unsatisfactory. Many attending my showing expressed the same sentiment.

I should not need to "read the book" to understand the film. However, as Chris and Oscar have often pointed out, knowing some stories ahead of time help with some productions. Chris could probably name numerous examples.

[tabuno]

cinemabon would have us require that flashbacks are only good so far as they lead to some definitive understanding and resolution at the end of the movie. Such a flashback requirement would pose issues for any movie where the resolution remains unclear or vague or even never resolved. Anybody see "Gone with the Wind" at the end of the movie?

I for one feel that by the end of "Duplicity" we have the winners and losers clearly demarcated, their intentions pretty well spelled out with or without the use of flashbacks (and for which I would argue weren't necessary for that purpose).

Either way, the use of flashbacks in my mind helped to expand on the character development, allowed the audience a more direct experience of the duplicity that may have occurred, laid out the groundwork of doublecrosses as they happened instead of what cinemabon and others insist would have been better dealt with in real time. Instead with flashbacks the audience was able to see and experience "possible" espionage behavior as its occurred in the past instead resorting to some distant real-time recall that would have defeated the more intimate nature of the flashback technique.

Either way, just because the flashback didn't help resolve any twist or provide an expansive explanation (that wasn't necessary their purpose). For me, the flashbacks helped to fill out the the context of the movie, the possible intentions as they were experienced at the time, and the characters' operating motivation. Thus the flashback scenes were not the problem nor should they be required to accomplish so much as cinemabon would insist.

The bottomline is that the flashback technique here was one of the better elements of this movie as the audience had an opportunity to place themselves in the characters' roles and attempt to determine the sincerity of the other character, thus compelling those interested in the movie to really pay further attention as if they were part of the movie. This movie wasn't for distant observers but directly involved participants that required mental effort and to experience the psychological dislocation of uncertainty, especially when confronted with the flashbacks and then the reality of the real-time aftermath. This part of the movie was, for me, some of the successful elements even though the movie as a whole was signficantly lacking in other ways.

[Chris Knipp]

Cinemabon: you say you are confused about who Clair and Ray are working for in the opening scenes, and I sympathize. But then I wonder why in an earlier comment you said "I don't believe I was lost in following the plot. On the contrary, I found the plot all too easy to follow." How can one say the plot is too easy to follow if one is missing identifying points about the principals?

tabuno: Both cinemabon and I would disagree wit your statement here: "The bottom line is that the flashback technique here was one of the better elements of this movie. . ." The time-lines are confusing, the flashbacks are confusing. We don't know what's gong on. As cinemabon said, the movie is too smart for its own good. The flashbacks can't be one of the best elements if they cause confusion and annoyance in the viewer.

Nonetheless I agree with you, tabuno, that at the end we know what's what:
I for one feel that by the end of "Duplicity" we have the winners and losers clearly demarcated, their intentions pretty well spelled out with or without the use of flashbacks (and for which I would argue weren't necessary for that purpose). We do know who's won and who's lost and what everybody was about. But you contradict yourself here, because if I understand you you are saying that the flashbacks weren't necessary; in that case how can they hve been "one of the best elements of this movie"? Surely the best elements of a movie aren't something that could have been dispensed with. The best elements must also be essential elements.

I think I have been consistent in saying that the flashbacks, though perhaps overdone like all the trickery (the "duplicity" of the writing paralleling the "duplicity" of the corporations and the hired spies), are not a bad idea. It's just that they are too confusing. A movie isn't redeemed by the fact that everything is explained at the end. It's how we got there that matters, and the road is too bumpy and confusing. And this is true whether the tone is serious or comic. i don't find fault with the playful tone. It's the only thing that makes all the machinations bearable. Otherwise they would simply be depressing.

Despite his obvious debts to other films with tricky flashbacks and tricky time schemes and the style of the BOURNE movies and much else, I think Gilroy is trying to do something different here. He's working with fashions and traditions and seeking to transcend them in his own way, and make a corporate espionage/spy caper/romance comedy/thriller--as the NEW YORKER critic says, a new "hybrid." But he goes a little too far. And in his last film, MICHAEL CLAYTON, he was less tricky, he strove less hard to be clever and original, he spent more time on character development, and he focused on more important issues. A company guilty of hiding the damage it's doing on the environment and on people to further its profits is a more important issue than a company trying to steal a formula for a cure for baldness from another company. Baldness is, when it comes down to it, not the end of the world.

[cinemabon]

I wrote that very late... very confusing... I'm trying to proof my novel and post at the same time.... better concentrate on one and read the other...

[Chris Knipp]

It's easy to lose track of what one's said. I'm glad we've had this exchange and have learned from it. However my own best statement on the film is my opening review. I could go into much more detail, particularly about individual scenes and story elements, but my position would remain essentially the same. Nobody has to convince me that DUPLICITY is a fun movie or full of flashy effects but it leaves me disappointed and when I realized that, the D.T. Max article about Gilroy helped me understand why.

[tabuno]

The use of flashbacks in this movie have been seriously misinterpreted as to their supposed purpose and use and as such using such an assumption as that they must be for the purpose of clarity and understanding of the movie is to miss their point in the movie.

The very idea that you may be confused and disoriented seems to demonstrate my very point that the use of flashbacks in this movie wasn't to increase understanding but to disorientate and to deceive and that they did in fact would suggest that the flashbacks succeeded in their purpose and as such were essential elements in the movie.

You may be confusing your feelings of confusion and coming up with an overly negative opinion based on such a feeling, but that is what the intention of the movie was, to induce imbalance and uncertainty. The movie succeeded with its flashbacks to create simultaneously both a relatively clear understanding of the movie by the ending and also a feeling of confusion and uncertainty - a rather effective and impressive feat in itself, if not totally successful in its overall delivery.

[Chris Knipp]

Well, we obviously differ on this. I say "The flashbacks can't be one of the best elements if they cause confusion and annoyance in the viewer." You say they are designed to cause confusion (which is no doubt partly true), but that that's good. I think cinemabon and I both agree that there is too much mystification in the movie, perhaps more than Gilroy really intended when he first went about making it. I felt too much played with; the effect was of frivolity, of a writer-director who's become too clever for his own good.

[tabuno]

I would agree that by the end of the movie that too much confusion did register with me and I felt uneasy not by intent but by the seemingly inordinate background noise (flashbacks). It is difficult to portion out the magnitude of disorientation and unease that arose due to the flashbacks and how much was a positive contribution to the storyline and how much was just unnecessary and became an irritating distraction from the essential nature of the story. It's possible that in the hands of another director or changes in the script, this movie along with changes to the flashbacks could have brought this rather creative and innovative look into espionage into better focus (for the audience that is) so we could have spent more of our attention on the mistrust and disquieting psychological interplay between to the two leads.

I can move my position towards the belief that the use of flashbacks in this movie created technical, cinematic problems for the audience that unnecessarily took away from the fascinating and compelling psychological element of the movie. I just can't say how much, but enough to be noticeable and enough to require changes to improve the movie.

But I still feel that the use of flashbacks in this movie is a crucial component of this movie and on balance were more of a benefit than a detriment to the movie. The flashbacks needed to be handled differently or the rest of the movie needed to be modified. I'm just not a genius to be able to determine which.

[Chris Knipp]

Of course the flashbacks are a crucial component of the movie, but not one that entirely works. Julia Roberts on Charlie Rose the other night said the five identical conversations were the main reason why she wanted to take the role.

[tabuno]

I just saw like the same "three" minutes of this same Charlie Rose interview by chance last night. I couldn't really understand what it was about. There was apparently something I missed because the deliberate same lines five times with different meanings required perhaps some underlying explanation that I never really did get from the movie. Or was it just a play on playing the espionage part as if acting out for fun.

I would agree that the flashbacks in their entirety, didn't entirely work. I still wonder if the director and script had kept it totally serious if it would have helped to reduce the "noise" in the movie and allowed the characters to really present a more comprehensible personality and background that would have opened up their roles and behavior on screen instead of confusing the audience even more than was necessary. I'm beginning to repeat myself.

[Chris Knipp]

[SPOILER WARNING!]

Claire and Ray are practicing the conversation because they want it to be overheard by their employers to make them think they have not been in cahoots with each other for some time. The opening sequence shows their first meeting when Claire drugs Claire and steals some sensitie documents. This shows that they have a rough history together. Presumably they have met and had that conversation later, but they're since gotten together, become lovers, and gotten in cahoots. And so they decide to use a replay of the conversation, making it llo like it came later, as a ruse to their employers (whom they're deceiving, acting as double agents).

The "Slate Spoiler" DUPLICITY podcast (http://odeo.com/episodes/24334655-Slate-s-Spoiler-Specials-Duplicity), a 15-minute discussion between Dana Stevens and John Swansbrg, will give you a thorough plot summary and explanation of the various exhanges between Clair and Ray and a good discussion of the pros and cons of the movie and the plot that is up front about the plot details. This will reveal all the "reveals." Like me, they feel there "are too many moments of confusion," though they like the CEO roles, title sequence, and some other elements better than I do, though I'd agree that the movie is elegant and fun and watchable, despite being flawed. I like it that the guy in this podcast mentions recently re-watching MICHAEL CLAYTON and confirming his impression that it's a very good movie and better than DUPLICITY, and he points as I have to the fact that the "secret" the corporation is hiding that others are ferreting out is a very much more significant and serious thing in MICHAEL CLAYTON than the one in DUPLICITY, and this reflects the relative weight of the two movies.

[cinemabon]

Point one - Interesting that Spielberg passed on the project because he found the flashbacks too confusing. Point two - the studio insisted on shooting the opening scene to help clarify the relationship between Ray and Claire.

Even the critics were confused... good link, Chris.

[Chris Knipp]

The drop-out of Spielberg is something I already mentioned in my review:
(The film will shift back and forth in time until you get hopelessly confused. The convolution of the structure caused Spielberg and Tom Cruise to drop interest in the project, and that's why Gilroy wound up doing it himself.) The other point about the studio insisting on a scene to establish the Claire-Ray relationship (which Gilroy initially wanted to leave unexplained) was new.

Of course the Slant website critics were confused. Many critics have been confused.. And when you do get it all figured out, you start to realize that there are elements that don't compute. This is almost the consensus: that it's a fun movie that went wrong because Glrroy got carried away in his writing. It's funny you said earlier maybe another director could have made more sense out of the flashbacks and stuff. Yeah, because another director, like Spielberg, would have demanded rewriting, which would have above all meant paring down of the complications and tricky surprises/reversals/reveals. Of course, I want to point out, some movies like MEMENTO and especially THE USUAL SUSPECTS, are more tricky and confusing, but that's different because DUPLICITY'S basic design is really so simple: it's just a romance of two paranoid spies in the context of a corporate espionage game. That's why in those cases the complications are okay and this time they're not.

[cinemabon]

The Slant Critics put it best: Had the film been about the drug company CEO's and their comic battle for superiority, the ending would have been less muddied than the distraction of the two main stars and their romance.

My favorite scene, besides the airport, is when Julia Roberts had to interview the woman who made love to Ray in some secret part of the company. Her gambit of emotions that ran from joy to sadness and back to joy when she recalled the lovemaking event ran counter to Roberts having to sit through the interview with a straight face. That scene and the opening were alone worth the price of renting the DVD... but that's all.

[tabuno]

The Julia Robert's interview scene represented the core of the movie's premise and revealed the complications of a relationship between spies. It was also one of the better scenes in the movie.

On the otherhand, the airport scene at the beginning was part of the problem of this movie, it was overblown, overly stylishly dramatic and played more for comedy and humor than serious psychological tension and gritty, in your face reality. The movie started off on the wrong foot and it could never really recover. The ending scene should have been the climactic revelation that life isn't always kind and is just another reversal among the difficulties we all sometimes face. "It's not like in the movies, hah, hah!" But unfortunately the over all tone of the movie made the ending anticlimactic and disturbing because the movie's premise of humor, lightness was turned on its head and comedy turned drama rarely works in movies.

[Chris Knipp]

I did like Julia's abandoning her usual charm for that scene.