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

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 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 cliché. 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 Splendor 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?

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.