smartgrrrl's guide to stuff

I’m trying this new thing of watching movies within a week of getting them from Netflix. I’d heard relatively good things about Duplicity and who am I to turn away Clive Owen, so I watched it last night.

Straight off the bat the movie ticked me off in a couple different ways: first, within the first five seconds, before the dialogue even kicks in, there’s a lingering shot of Julia Roberts’ cleavage. It’s such blatant ogling (in fact, in my memory it’s as though the camera starts panning up but then does a double take, which doesn’t happen but may as well) that it can serve no other purpose than to remind us that this is a movie made by heterosexual dudes for other heterosexual dudes. And it doesn’t matter if Julia Roberts isn’t your cup of tea, because cleavage is cleavage — amirite fellas? It wasn’t that I was morally or feministically outraged (I’m as appreciative of other women’s breasts as the next heterosexual woman, though I don’t care to have someone else repeatedly poke me, hollering “lookit lookit lookit THOSE PUPPIES”), it was more like resignation: “Oh. It’s going to be THAT kind of movie.” (To be fair, it’s actually not that kind of movie, but . . . well, first impressions and all that.)

Second, the titles all have words spelled out in capital letters except for one or two lower case letters — “DUPLICiTY,” for example, which only makes me think of that inanity that is WriTinG eVeRyThiNG LiKe THiS.

(There was another small moment in which Clive Owen wishes Julia Roberts a happy 4th of July — they’re at the U.S. Embassy in Dubai, on the 4th — and she says “And to you” or something, which at the time bugged me because he’s British, and it wasn’t at all clear from her expression whether it was meant to be funny, but in retrospect it doesn’t bother me all that much now, because really, it’s just a silly small talk thing that I’d probably do as well.)

But then after the titles they’re in Manhattan, with an amusing little “stupid slow people walking around in Manhattan” moment, and I have a major weakness for movies filmed in New York, no matter how bad they wind up being, so . . . I decided to give it another chance.

And I sort of liked the movie. While the script does have several genuinely witty moments (and there’s one reveal at the end that I won’t give away but did make me gasp), there were still a few too many places I was able to say “Well, that wasn’t necessary” (starting with the cleavage shot). The narrative device got tedious halfway through, as did those Soderbergh-esque frame fades. Overall the movie lacks momentum.

Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti are hilarious as battling CEOs, but then they’re always fun to watch, which made me wish the movie spent more time on them. That any consumer products company would engage in such shady spy practices in order to get an edge in the market is 100% believable — very easy to imagine it was Johnson & Johnson vs. Proctor & Gamble.

I’m not a Julia Roberts fan but liked her in this, and would like her to do more of this sort of movie because she does “inscrutable” very well. Clive Owen was . . . well, to be honest, there was something about his performance that I didn’t quite like, but I’m having a hard time teasing out what it is. The best I can come up with is this: It was like he was in a slightly different movie than Julia Roberts. She was playing more toward a mapcap romantic comedy, while I think he was a little more serious, playing more to the espionage thriller aspect. Duplicity tries to be both — it doesn’t always succeed at both.

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