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..Michael Wilmington

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Duplicity, I Love You Man, Knowing, and The Great Buck Howard
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Duplicity (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
U.S.; Tony Gilroy, 2009
    
Tony Gilroy’s Duplicity is slick wish-fulfillment of a particularly delicious kind: a romantic comedy suspense thriller set in the same super-high-tech world of corporate intrigue and deadly gamesmanship Gilroy used as a stylish backdrop in Michael Clayton, but reconfigured this time as this time for a tongue-in-cheek contemporary Cary Grantish-Grace Kellyish sort-of-Hitchcockian vehicle for Julia Roberts and Clive Owen.

The result is swift, pretty, classy, brainy and full of clever cross-talk and exciting set-pieces -- a movie that gives you the voyeuristic charge and delight of watching its super-sexy costars playing dangerous games with each other and us, as upper-echelon corporate spies Claire Stenwick (Roberts) and Ray Koval (Owen), as well as with a pair of corporate king snakes played by Tom Wilkinson (as sneaky-mean Howard Tully of the fictitious Burkett and Randle) and Paul Giamatti (as hyperbolic/devious Richard Garsik of mythical Omnikrom).
      
That’s a quartet of actors who should get your motor running even if they were showing up for another movie about championship poker or for a bio-drama on Calvin Coolidge -- and Duplicityis high-grade, silky-smooth stuff, near the top of its class.
    
In fact, if there’s any reasonable objection to Gilroy’s new movie, it’s that some audiences, spoiled rotten by standard-issue contemporary Hollywood thrillers and teen-sex farces, may find it hard to follow -- just as some people were a little befuddled by Michael Clayton. But I don’t think the movie‘s I. Q. should be held against it. The whole cleverly unwinding plot makes sense by the end, and the elements that may cause some temporary confusion, such as the fractured, back-and-forth-in-time chronology and the persistent repetition, in different contexts and different countries, of the dialogue of the same hostile confrontation scene between Claire and Ray -- who have an introductory fling-in-the-sack after a Dubai cocktail party, and then meet each other in New York, Rome and various other big-glamour backgrounds -- all prove part of the same ingeniously worked out plot and counterplot.
     
Claire and Ray are spies, but their targets aren’t Cold War style feuding nations, but back-stabbingly nefarious multi-national corporations, battling over a secret formula for a household product that could change the world and reap billions for the winner. Claire has penetrated Burkett and Randle, and Ray is her Omnikrom contact/handler, despite what seems a residue of bad feelings over previous love affairs and corporate tiffs. When they talk, they whip each other with words and dodges; when they spy, they have all their cards close to the vest and all their tricks as solidly, colorfully at hand as the Rubik’s Cubes they both carry. And when they screw, you never know, who’s going to manipulate or walk out on whom.
    
Roberts and Owen make sex seem like a contact sport, and corporate intrigue seem like the stuff of 007 and SMERSH. Owen would have made a good James Bond, natty and deadly as Daniel Craig but a tad wittier, and this is the movie that proves it. And Roberts actually could play Tracy Lord in an update of The Philadelphia Story and bring it off.
   
But I enjoyed Duplicity more than the last Bond and the last three Oceans, or the Coens’Intolerable Cruelty (which I wanted to enjoy more)-- and I certainly liked it better than the botched, arch remake of The Women. I dug it for the antics of its stars and its two main villains -- Wilkinson and Giamatti‘s Tully and Garsik, whom we first see in a slow-mo comedy airfield donnybrook, supposedly beating the shit out of each other --and also for its stellar, densely populated supporting cast -- especially Kathleen Chalfant as a canny old lady on one of the spy teams, and Carrie Preston as one of Ray’s more-than-delighted conquests.
    
The kick of the movie is that we’re never really sure, until the end, who’s playing whom and why. Roberts uses her coltish, snappish, sexiness to seduce us as well as Ray, and Owen opens up a vein of comic vulnerability and schlemielhood beneath the Bondishness. So what’s the underlying theme here? Is sex just a career tool, beauty and charm just corporate come-ons? Duplicity is about smart, highly professional but amoral people, who may be stabbing each in the back at every turn. And, given the recent exposure of corporate duplicity in our own financial world, it’s a movie that’s become as timely as it is entertaining.
   
The major difference between Duplicity and our own reality, in fact, is that some of the characters here are smart and greedy while most of their real-life counterparts have proven to be greedy and inept. My own observation suggests that most hard-core corporate sneaks and game-players are closer to the latter than the former, and that deregulating the financial variety was like handing loaded guns to gangs of loaded children.
    
But Duplicity isn’t interested in that kind of Three-Stooges-ish slapstick. I would have liked a different ending than Gilroy gives us -- maybe Clooney‘s Clayton showing up in a cameo to clean everything up -- but this mightily entertaining and molto seductive movie definitely shows contemporary Hollywood professionalism at its most attractively duplicitous.

I Love You, Man (Three Stars)
U. S.; John Hamburg, 2009
    
I Love You, Man is a buddy-buddy comedy with flawless central casting: two near-perfectly mismatched buddies -- played by Paul Rudd and Jason Segel as nervous, sensitive real estate agent Peter Klaven and Sydney Fife, his slobbo, over-direct, appealingly macho bud. It also has a lot of canny, clever insights into the psychosexual links between close male friends from director-writer John Hamburg and co writer Larry Levin, as well as the actors.
    
It’s a movie that surprised me. It started off so stupidly, and with such a misbegotten opening premise that I almost gave up on it after ten minutes. But then Segel’s Sydney showed up and suddenly, I Love You, Man righted itself and started getting very funny and smart, eventually (but not quite) moving almost into the Sideways-Odd Couple territory of male bonding, mismatched buddies humor.
    
The bad premise is the goofy notion that Rudd’s Peter, a punctilious, intelligent chap who’s never had a male best buddy, but gets along fabulously with women, would decide -- in the waning weeks before his marriage to fabulously understanding fiancée Zooey (Rashida Jones, very good too) -- to begin a concerted campaign to find or recruit a best bud. So we get dopey scenes where Peter, advertising for “friendship” in a match.com style webby way, goes out on “mandates” which apparently haven’t been screened to prevent embarrassment and leave him open for obvious gay gags. The daffy forced undercurrents here are heightened by another character, Peter’s studly homosexual brother Robbie (Andy Samberg), who also tries to set him up, with feeble results.
    
Luckily, Segel’s Sydney shows up at one of Peter’s open houses -- to sell Lou “The Incredible Hulk” Ferrigno’s old mansion. (Ferrigno amusingly parodies himself.) Peter and Sydney, who has a preternatural insight into open house behavior and the etiquette of farting, hit it off almost instantly, and the movie recovers itself and stays on course until the end. The sense of psychology and comic pitch, which go so awry in the lame-o trolling-for-a-buddy section (which I still think should have been dropped, laughs or not), suddenly kicks back in.
    
Sydney is exactly the sort of shaggy-man guy -- a seemingly happy bachelor, let-it-all-hang-out smart jock type, clever observer and Rush fan, with raffish Venice Beach digs and a talent for embarrassing candor, to whom a bright repressed good-guy type like Peter would be drawn (and who would be drawn to him in return). And the problems and disruptions Sydney causes -- in Peter’s engagement and in his life -- are both believable and often hilarious.
    
Why did director-co-writer Hamburg (Along Came Polly and the Meet the Parents scripts) and co-writer Larry Levin (Eddie Murphy’s Doctor Dolittle) stick us with the opening? My guess is they thought it was a funny concept, and just wouldn’t let go of (or rework) a few gags, like the French-kissing assault on Peter, that they thought were sure-fire laugh-getters. (They sure got laughs from my audience.) The rest of the movie, however, is funny and smart and perceptive. That’s what makes it good.
    
That and the cast -- including Jon Favreau (as a marvelously uptight a-hole), Jaime Pressly, J. K. Simmons, Jane Curtin and lots of others -- topped by the seemingly relaxed but on-the-edge camaraderie that Rudd and Segel generate. Segel is a fantastic macho-buddy; Rudd is a terrific straight man. And, once Sydney shows up, dispensing fart lore, the movie stays mostly on-target and funny until the end -- even if the climactic wedding gag goes on too long. (Never mind; the under-the-credits jokes rescue the movie again.)
    
I Love You, Man, which should be a big hit -- and redeems Rudd from his recent bad buddy-comedy Role Models -- proves again that character humor often works better than high concept dirty-gag jokes. And also that there’s nothing like a good buddy to hang with and jam with and embarrass the hell out of you. Or than a girlfriend who understands.

 
Knowing (Two Stars)
U. S.; Alex Proyas, 2009
    
Apocalypse anyone? Something awful is happening in the world and Nic Cage’s John Koestler is hot on its trail, after his son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) pulls an odd page full of numbers out of a 50-years- buried time capsule at his elementary school. Nic’s gloomy-eyed, touchy teacher Koestler (his name inspired maybe by the author of Darkness at Noon?) discovers that the numbers refer to a string of major disaster tragedies, including 9/11, over the last 50 years, with only a handful left to go.
    
Fairly soon Koestler is running around like Chicken Little, with similar results, and a group of taciturn supernatural strangers, who vaguely resemble sinister pseudo- Stings or David Bowies if you don’t look too close, are tailing Koestler and Caleb -- and also Diana Wayland (Rose Byrne), the daughter of the one-time little girl Lucinda (Lara Robinson) who wrote the numbers, and Diana‘s little girl Abby (also Robinson). Caleb has started writing numbers too, which I thought at first was a hopeful sign for everyone except maybe the catastrophe-chasing Koestler -- since it might mean we had years more of disasters to live through before the big Lights Out time. That shows how much I know about apocalypses, or movies with M. Night Shyamalan-sounding titles.
     
I might be making all this sound a little silly, but I couldn’t possibly make it sound as silly as it really is, even if I tried to write this while standing on my head and blowing razzberries. For example, the teacher in charge of the time capsule makes her kids race through their drawings/predictions in the last minute, ripping Lucinda’s numbers out of her hands. Koestler keeps running from disaster to disaster -- the numbers sheet includes latitude and longitude of the locations -- with the cops never listening to his warnings. The climactic sun flares are perhaps the only recent disaster we can’t reasonably blame on George W. Bush, Karl Rove and the gang didn’t bring on, but that doesn’t make them more palatable. And the climactic hope-for-tomorrow scene, complete with bunny rabbits, alone qualifies Knowing for some kind of fuzzy-headed camp prize.
   
Proyas (The Crow, Dark City) hasn’t lost his intense, fantastic science fiction visual sensibility, Blade Runner crossed with The Wizard of Oz. He may be the director who really should have tackled Watchmenand his disaster scenes are blow-aways. But he should stay away from bunny-rabbits, unless he’s filming an Easter Egg hunt.
    
Bottom line: It’s about time for Nic Cage to take a vacation from mega-thrillers and start doing movies like Wild at Heart and Leaving Las Vegas again. He can always do another National Treasure if the Depression hits. But I‘m beginning to cringe when I think of going to a new Nic Cage movie, not because he’s not doing them well, but because most of them aren’t worth doing, well or not. Anyway, maybe theseKnowing filmmakers can wait out the disasters and bury this movie in an elementary school time capsule. I guarantee our descendants will be pretty damn befuddled when they open it up in 2059, if we’re all still around.
 
The Great Buck Howard (Two-and-a-Half Stars)
U. S.; Sean McGinly, 2008
    
Sometimes a performance is so damned good it all but overwhelms the movie it’s in. The Great Buck Howard -- not a very impressive movie otherwise -- is fortunate indeed to have John Malkovich to do the overwhelming act here, as the Great Buck: an irascible, supersensitive, comically haughty professional magician/mentalist/night club entertainer, in one of the last legs of his career. Howard, whom the credits admit was inspired by the real-life prestidigitator The Amazing Kreskin (still going strong in his 70s), was, like Kreskin, a fixture on The Johnny Carson Show (61 appearances, he keeps bragging). And the touchy performer specializes in the usual slight of hand and some Liberace-ish piano playing, plus a genuinely bewildering mind reading act, in which, almost infallibly, he picks out an audience member hiding some cash.

Buck’s is a good show much of the time -- and the smaller and less sophisticated the city (like the ones populated here by Debra Monk and Steve Zahn), the more they love him. But Buck‘s Carson years are over. He’s become a tantrum-throwing drama queen, ridiculed in Rolling Stone, and its clear that his Vegas shots are drying up and that he’ll rarely anymore get far beyond the Holiday Inn small city circuit, on which he’s become a fixture.
     
Malkovich plays Buck to a Carnack fare-thee-well, nailing every ultra-sarcastic inflection, every campy tic and trick in his repertoire. Unfortunately the film, written and directed by ex-Kreskin assistant Sean McGinly, is as much about Buck‘s rising young roadie and law school refugee, Troy Gable (played by Colin Hanks, whose dad Tom helped produce the picture and does a cameo as Troy‘s pop) and Troy’s affair with hot publicist Valerie Brennan (Emily Blunt) as it is about the fading magic man. Big mistake. Troy, who narrates the picture, is someone we’ve met before, too many timers: a plucky young duderino in the young Matthew Broderick-Jon Cryer mold, who loves Buck despite his bad behavior, and also has enough pizzazz the snare the ingénue (Blunt). Hanks is a good actor, but his part needs a little madness of its own to spice it up -- and to compete honestly with Malkovich’s compelling, hypnotic, screw-loose bravura as Buck.

Read Michael Wilmington on DVDs

- Michael Wilmington
March 19, 2009

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