Mirror Image: THE DOUBLE

Richard Ayoade’s The Double is a movie that sounds intriguing. It’s about a man who discovers his new co-worker looks exactly like him. How interesting! It’s also a movie that looks great. Pass by it on cable and you just might linger, wondering what enjoyable goings-on take place inside the fanciful production design, dramatically lit and precisely shot. It is unfortunate, then, that the movie never develops much of interest within the confines of its compelling hook and fine design. It’s thin and empty, not so much inhabiting its looks and ideas as borrowing them. Like Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, which earlier this year doubled Jake Gyllenhaal to little interest, Ayoade, adapting a Dostoevsky story, has a terrific concept, a game cast, an interesting look, and nowhere to go.

The man at the center of the double dilemma is timid office drone Simon (Jesse Eisenberg). He does good work, but the world seems to crushingly ignore him, ensnaring him in bureaucratic red-tape mazes at best, skipping over him entirely at worst. The waitress at his favorite restaurant always brings him the wrong order. He nurses a crush on his neighbor and co-worker (Mia Wasikowska), but never acts upon it. He has great ideas to improve his office’s efficiency, but the boss (Wallace Shawn) brushes him aside, telling him to babysit his intern (Yasmin Page), a surly teenager who also happens to be his daughter. The world is a lonely, gloomy place for Simon.

In the peculiar world of the film, it always seems to be night. The characters are pale, their faces impassive, their words strung along into sentences of matter-of-fact, by-the-book knots. It’s a Terry Gilliam/Jean-Pierre Jeunet/Tim Burton kind of world with production designer David Crank providing flickering lights, oversized ducts and pipes, steaming vents, rusty mechanical contraptions, and spotty retro-futurist structures covered in elaborate alternative universe tech and bric-a-brac. The weight of all this busyness keeps Simon crushed down in the imagery, stark lighting highlighting his alienation from the busy people droning along through apparently much happier lives around him.

Enter James, a new co-worker the others in the office immediately take a liking to. He’s everything Simon isn’t: successful and confident to the point of arrogance. He also looks exactly like Simon, a funny coincidence and something no one else seems to notice or care about. The two men eventually get to know each other and even help each other out by switching places at crucial moments. But it’s all very strange and destabilizing for James, who is intimidated by his double. At one point he explains his insecurities, saying he “sees the man he wants to be, but can’t get there.” His wish is made real in the form of his double, allowing him to see the advantages and disadvantages of being a more forceful individual. On the one hand, he could go after what he wants. On the other hand, what if what he wants is wanted by his double as well? Ah, there’s the problem.

And so it’s double versus double or something like that as the story slowly drains down to its glum conclusions. Along the way, Ayoade exercises good formal control over the technical aspects of the picture, from the dim, whimsical production design to the precise blocking involved in doubling Eisenberg in many a shot, allowing him to interact with himself in tricky ways. Eisenberg is a performer good at suggesting jumpy neuroses, anxious intelligence, and tangled interior debates. No wonder he makes such a good scene partner for himself, playing essentially two halves of a whole character, a man’s inner emotional conflict made literal. Sometimes I got confused, not quite able to pin down which man was which, but he locates an emotional consistency that’s a solid anchor.

The character design is as sturdy and inscrutable as the dialogue is designed to be deadpan, the sets strikingly artificial, the plot cold and lost in its own thoughts. It’s a forced whimsy, happy to be odd and particular without much in the way of insight or inviting further consideration. There’s simply nothing pulling along the assemblage of influences and design choices into any sort of involving larger picture. There’s no reason to invest or care. Ayoade is a director of potential. His TV work, like cult favorite Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, is strong, but his cinematic efforts lag behind. This is his second film, after the coming-of-age Submarine, a similarly stylishly empty work of great control, thin substance, and borrowed imagination. I look forward to the day when he finds better material to match his talents. 

Free Your Mind and the Rest Will Follow: THE MASTER

Paul Thomas Anderson opens The Master with a long, hypnotic shot of churning waters, a rippling disturbance in calm, blue ocean, the wake of an unseen ship. This image – an image repeated a few more times throughout the film – proves to be a fitting one for two reasons. First, the hypnotic nature of the opening shot leads us into a film about a deeply disturbed World War II veteran who falls into a cult in its early stages of creation and propagation, a kind of slow, enveloping hypnosis. Second, the shot signals a main thematic preoccupation of the film concerning the wake of psychological damage damaged people can leave behind them as they travel through life, a ripple of destruction a person can create, knowingly or unknowingly, for those who come in contact with him.

The two damaged men at the heart of this film are that disoriented veteran stumbling through the scar tissue of conflict in such a way that he can’t convincingly fit into post-war American society and the cult leader who takes him in and attempts to indoctrinate him into The Cause. Freddie, the veteran (Joaquin Phoenix), has emotional pain and exhibits erratic behavior, the roots of which stretch deep into his past. His family has a history of alcoholism and mental instability. As the film begins, we see him sitting on a beach, away from his fellow Navy crewmembers. He’s hacking at coconuts with a machete, molesting a sandcastle woman, and creating makeshift, surely poisonous, booze out of a suspect concoction of beverages and chemicals. Years pass, as do opportunities for jobs and relationships, until he meets Lancaster Dodd, The Master (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Freddie, fleeing the latest group of people enraged at his drunken, inscrutable unpredictability, stows away about The Master’s ship. Lancaster knows a lost soul when he sees one. Freddie is, after all, a possible convert. Lancaster, a man who has a professorial snake-oil salesman charm, introduces himself matter-of-factly as “a writer, a doctor, a nuclear physicist and a theoretical philosopher…” This would be a laugh line if it weren’t so frightening how fully he believes it and how ready Freddie is to believe it too. Lancaster offers the poor man a place to stay in this growing family of followers so long as he agrees to help out and submit to emotionally distressing “processing,” absorbing, torturous New Age psychological interrogation. And so The Master has found himself a new subject.

Anderson’s film moves elliptically through time, tracking the relationship between The Master and Freddie as the cult grows in power and is on the receiving end of heated questions from contentious outsiders and brave insiders alike. Vivid supporting characters include Dodd’s sharp-tongued, deceptively matronly wife (Amy Adams), supportive son-in-law (Rami Malek) and disillusioned son (Jesse Plemons), as well as several followers and defenders (including a small role for the always wonderful Laura Dern). But Anderson is not interested in simply charting the rise of this fringe group loosely based on L. Ron Hubbard’s early-1950’s group that became Scientology. Though the film has the epic sweep of Anderson’s Boogie Nights or Magnolia, sprawling, virtuosic period pieces, it plays out with the squirmy, uncomfortable intimacy of his ugly-beautiful introverted rom com (of sorts) Punch Drunk Love.

This is what he was doing in his last film, the instantly, toweringly essential There Will Be Blood, but here he’s working with a narrower emotional range. It doesn’t climb to the same emotional heights and precise blending of intimate and epic. This is an epic of mental interiors. The production design from David Crank and Jack Fisk captures the time and place with a precision that appears effortless and seamless. Mihai Malaimare Jr.’s cinematography, in rich, stunning, and rare 65mm, sketches detailed shots that play out in long, meticulously composed takes with locked down angles that occasionally move with a sudden, fluid force. This is an attractively rendered production of emotional ugliness with a focus on both the high minded philosophy and psychology behind these men and the base instincts, dirty jokes and bodily functions that mark them as ultimately only human. Anderson marshals considerable craftsmanship in his capturing of incredible performances from two clashing characters who appear to be complete opposites, but are nonetheless continually drawn together by their shared perplexing, fascinating, mesmerizing intensity of opacity.

Phoenix has a twisted, sickly demeanor here, a way of standing half-hunched, moving with a drunken, hesitantly feral quality to his gait. He twists his face into a confused crumple of painful-looking wrinkles and glowering, deep, penetrating stares. He’s a man burying himself in his physicality. Hoffman, in contrast, has the gregarious regal comportment of a man completely sure in his own certitude. Even when directly confronted about his fanciful dogma that one character close to him admits is “[made up] as he goes along,” he’s fiercely defensive, cruel even to those who admire him the most. It’s easy to see him as a deluded monster, but Anderson and Hoffman create a far more sympathetic portrait than mere damnation. Without exploring this man’s background, we can see what draws people in and what is utterly convincing about his methodology. He pulls in seekers, those yearning for purpose, and gives them the comfort of certainty, no matter the psychological cost.

This is a strong work of filmmaking, a work in which each and every aspect is fine tuned and polished to perfection. But unlike Anderson’s earlier films, exuberant, inviting works, even at their most difficult or foreboding, the film is so perfectly closed off, a dense psychological thicket of characterization and detail. Perhaps the key image is one that finds Freddie and Lancaster in neighboring jail cells, framed with a barred window between them and a wall of bars between them and the camera. Freddie thrashes against the confinement. Lancaster sits patiently, stewing in his anger. Throughout the film, despite their connection, they’re unable to ever truly reach each other and we in the audience can only watch from a distance as they struggle to get there no matter the cost to those in their wake.