Playing the players

Heist films, particularly the comedic caper best represented by Jules Dassin's Topkapi, William Wyler's How to Steal a Million (perhaps better titled How to Steal Ideas from Jules Dassin) and George Roy Hill's The Sting, are an endangered genre. The last good serious heist film was Spike Lee's Inside Man from 2006 - a film so successful that we are now being threatened with Inside Man 2.

Comedy capers, however, have died the death. One has lately been given the choice between the Brat Pack's self-serving Ocean's outings or the astonishingly ill-advised resurrection of the Pink Panther franchise with another Hollywood egomaniac, Steve Martin. That these have all been retoolings and rebootings of finer original films is evidence of how far the caper has come down in the world.

While nowhere near reaching the diamond-cut precision of Dassin's Topkapi, Tony Gilroy's Duplicity comes close to offering hope that it's still possible to make a comic heist film for an intelligent audience. In many ways, Duplicity is Gilroy's own light antidote to his dark drama of corporate intrigue, Michael Clayton. As with the latter film, Duplicity is centered in the world of cutthroat corporate politics. But, rather than dealing with corporate lawyers, devious CEOs and murderous managers, Duplicity is wedged between two warring pharmaceutical corporations, both of which depend upon spies to keep abreast of what the other is doing.

The battle between Burkett & Randle and Equikrom is played just short of blood, although Howard Tully (CEO of Burkett & Randle) and Richard Garsick (CEO of Equikrom) cannot meet without taking a swing at each other. It's a relationship akin to a death match between Proctor & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson.

Tully (Tom Wilkinson, back with Gilroy after Michael Clayton) and Garsick (Paul Giamatti) are so serious about their competition with each other that they've hired spies from the CIA, MI6 and the former KGB. But, as in those halcyon days of Le Carre's spy-versus-spy tales, there's plenty of fluidity in the corporate espionage ranks, leaving one never quite sure who might be a double agent or mole.

There's certainly no way of knowing the allegiance of agents Claire Stenwick and Ray Koval. Stenwick (Julia Roberts) is ex-CIA, while Koval (Clive Owen) is a former spook for MI6. As in Michael Clayton, Gilroy likes narratives that play with linearity. We first meet Stenwick and Koval a few years earlier, when they are still working for their separate intelligence agencies. They meet at an embassy garden party, where Koval quickly decides to put the make on Stenwick. She's hesitant at first, indeed hostile. But he finally manages to woo her back to his hotel.

Gilroy immediately establishes that we will spend the next two hours trying to figure out who is playing whom. Stenwick might have not appeared that easy to seduce initially, but once won, she's strangely prepared to slip Koval a Micky Finn and then search his room for documents.

Years later, they meet in Manhattan as two spies being paid by Garsick to find out what Tully has been developing in secret. Their past (and that past gets very complicated) leaves one grappling with Stenwick and Koval's true identities. We might occasionally congratulate ourselves for figuring it out, but then Gilroy introduces another flashback (wonderfully structured with the same split-screen effect Norman Jewison employed in another heist touchstone, The Thomas Crown Affair), and we're tossed back into utter confusion.

Structurally, the film is a complex maze, though many will undoubtedly find it convoluted. And although the dialogue is as crisp and searing as Gilroy's script for Michael Clayton, it must be noted that there's a surprising lot of lazy plotting in Duplicity. Unlike the urge to return to Synecdoche, New York to attempt to orient oneself in Charlie Kaufman's monumental city of a film, a second viewing of Duplicity would probably reveal far too many of the cracks and fractures in its handsome facade. It's a wholly entertaining film, but far from Gilroy's best work.

What carries this film are the performances, particularly the repairing of Roberts and Owen after the unfortunate Closer. Owen, lately, has been lured toward the trap of being his generation's Harrison Ford-like suspense hero. Duplicity, refreshingly, allows him room for humor, and the actor thrives in it.

Owen also has a breezy rapport with Roberts, an actor I always thought extremely overrated. Yet recently, Roberts has begun to mature into an interesting performer. After her hiatus from the screen, she came back to steal Charlie Wilson's War out from underneath Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Now hitting the screen in Duplicity, she's something of a revelation. She gives a gutsy, humorous performance that makes her Stenwick more of a Stanwyck. Wilkinson and Giamatti are also great fun - the former a sly plotter versus the latter's brazen guile.

Whatever unfortunate shortcuts Gilroy employs to get there, finally, the ending is perfect, striking a similar bittersweet note as in Topkapi, where all the players will finally have been played.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at
ssilvis@praguepost.com