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.
