What to Stream: Julia Roberts and Clive Owens' Twisty Spy Romance 'Duplicity'
Duplicity (2009)
The Basics: A delightfully sophisticated caper about two corporate spies (Clive Owen and Julia Roberts) whose romantic past comes to light when they’re employed by rival companies.
If You Liked: Focus, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and The Sting
In the new Will Smith film Focus, a seasoned con artist and his protégée (Margot Robbie) fall in love while agonizing over whether to trust one another. That’s not a problem for Ray (Clive Owen) and Claire (Julia Roberts), the protagonists of Tony Gilroy’s oddly neglected 2009 romance Duplicity. During one sexy moment, Claire leans into Ray’s ear and whispers “Admit it — you don’t trust me either.” These two don’t know how to have a normal conversation without working an angle, and that’s what makes the sparks fly.
Strictly speaking, Duplicity might not be a con-artist movie, but it works on the same principles. Two masters of the art of deception, the charming bumbler Ray and the preternaturally cool Claire, join forces to pull one over on the rival pharmaceutical companies that employ them. Both are ex-government spies, and the rub is that they share a romantic past — and possibly, a romantic present. Writer-director Gilroy keeps the audience guessing by leaping back and forth in time throughout the story, an ingenious device that mimics the way the main characters live their lives (always two steps ahead!) and upends the predictability that plagues so many con-artist movies. Duplicity’s big twists are genuine surprises, because viewers are too busy trying to untangle the characters’ pasts to second-guess what’s coming.
What really makes Duplicity sparkle though, is its unexpected setting: corporate espionage. Gilroy is a master at pulling psychological drama from the business world, from his neo-Gothic screenplay for Devil’s Advocate to his much-lauded directorial debut Michael Clayton. In Duplicity, he finds comedy in a corporate culture where the monetary stakes are sky-high, but the actual objects are remarkably petty: a skin cream formula, for example, or a frozen-pizza recipe. Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti play the rival pharmaceutical CEOs who employ entire teams of spies in an effort to find some miniscule flaw in the other’s business. Everything the audience needs to know about their world is revealed in a brilliant, slow-motion title sequence, during which the two CEOs emerge from their respective private jets and proceed to pummel one another on the tarmac.
That scene is just one example of the clever, stylish filmmaking that Gilroy employs in Duplicity. Here’s another: There is one conversation in the movie between Ray and Claire that the audience hears repeated four times, and each time, it takes on an entirely different meaning. Maybe that sophistication made Duplicity a tough sell when it released in March 2009, to good reviews and poor box office. That’s a shame, because it’s also fun and sexy — a terrific grown-up movie about the power and danger of lying to each other and ourselves.
Duplicity is available for digital rental on Amazon, iTunes, Flixster, Xbox, and Vudu.
Watch the trailer:
Image credit: Universal Pictures
