Romance and espionage don’t mix
Duplicity could have done without its screwball romantic comedy, says Andrew M Brown
20 March 2009

Julia Roberts, back in her first lead role since giving birth to three children, looks stunning but seems curiously disengaged

The point about Julia Roberts and Clive Owen in Duplicity is supposed to be that their characters are in love, but are also spies, so they don't know whether they can trust each other. "If I told you that I loved you, would it make any difference?" Julia Roberts asks Clive Owen. "If you told me," he replies, "or if I believed you?" That's one of the wittier exchanges.

The director Tony Gilroy returns to the world of corporate corruption that was the subject of Michael Clayton (2007), which he also wrote the screenplay for and directed. This time he adds a humorous love story and a theme of industrial espionage. The spying business absorbs Gilroy - after all, he did write the screenplays for the three Bourne thrillers - but he struggles to breathe life into the romantic comedy part.

The plot centres on two pharmaceutical corporations and their CEOs - monstrous egomaniacs Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson) of Burkett and Randle and Dick Garsick (Paul Giamatti) of Omnikrom. Tully and Garsick are driven by a desperate desire to outmanoeuvre the hated other.

An opportunity arises when Tully secures the formula to the philosopher's stone of dermatological treatments - a product that millions of customers, especially men, will feel compelled to buy.

Garsick then commands his team of whizz-kids in their hi-tech bunker (of those, Kathleen Chalfant and Denis O'Hare are especially good) to track down Tully's formula.

Claire Stenwick (Roberts) is a former CIA operative now employed by Tully in Burkett and Randle's counter-intelligence department. Ray Koval (ex-MI6) does a similar job for Garsick's Omnikrom. They're meant to be protecting their employers' discoveries but they focus a close eye on rivals' research at the same time.

Claire and Ray share a secret past: when they were both still government agents, Claire encountered Ray at a diplomatic reception in Dubai. She overcame and drugged him as part of a mission so that she could turn over his hotel room and steal the Egyptian defence codes he was carrying.

The experience affects Ray and when the two meet again in Rome they begin a love affair. (As with nearly all Julia Roberts films, there are no sex scenes to speak of: Claire and Ray's affair is signaled when hotel staff reveal the couple have not emerged from their room for three days, in John-and-Yoko style.)

Claire and Ray don't only forge an emotional bond. Once they've left the secret services and the rival civilian firms have taken them on, they decide to "go private" in a more elaborate sense by collaborating to cheat their employers, steal the formula for the amazing new treatment and sell it. This heist, so they think, will net them $40 million.

In the cold war between the two corporations, Claire and Ray are double- and even triple-agents in a confidence game involving multiple layers of deception. No one quite knows what the other is up to and this extends to Claire and Ray's relationship. Gilroy puts in a few anguish-filled scenes showing the lovers setting traps to test each other's loyalty - but do we care? Part of the problem is the script: it works with masculine, technical stuff but its attempts at screwball comedy only enervate.

The other problem is the performances. Clive Owen is a decent actor but he's no George Clooney, much less Cary Grant; Julia Roberts, though she looks stunning in her first lead role since giving birth to three children, appears curiously disengaged.

Giamatti and Wilkinson are another story. Wilkinson, black-suited and cold, hands out devilish orders while pruning a bonsai tree with manicure implements. Giamatti was brilliant in Sideways (2006) and then won lots of awards as John Adams in the HBO miniseries last year. He steals his scenes and delivers some very funny lines as Garsick, a podgy, goggle-eyed tyrant who's constantly on the point of bursting a blood vessel.

As he did with Michael Clayton, Gilroy renders a fairly simple plot opaque and hides some of the illogicalities by means of editing. He chops back and forth in time and makes travelogue-style switches of location - Dubai: five years ago, Cleveland: last week, or whatever. The Houses of Parliament and the lions surrounding Nelson's column denote "London". There is unintentional humour when, at Trafalgar Square, Clive Owen gets out of a car and heads off purposefully - towards the middle of the fountain.

The director also likes using split screens and dissolving boxes, which give a slick, retro look (compare The Thomas Crown Affair). It all looks stylish - the super-cool design, controlled palette (the way, for instance, the actors' clothes match the sets) and rapid cutting.

Gilroy is best at creating bursts of heightened urgency. There's an anxious set-piece where Claire is marooned in the Burkett and Randle skyscraper with a piece of paper containing the secret formula. Before Tully's man returns she has only a few seconds to transmit it to Ray in Omnikrom's surveillance bunker. She has to find a photocopy machine - which happens to be on a different floor - implanted with a surveillance device that can copy the formula. It is one of the plot's oddities that Claire doesn't send the formula via the nearest fax machine or even just copy it out with a pencil.

As this lop-sided film, with its combination of jejune leads and super-charged secondary players, rushes to an unlikely conclusion, Gilroy piles up the plot reversals with such dizzying speed you forget to check if any of it makes sense.