DUPLICITY

Written and Directed by Tony Gilroy
Starring Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti


Claire Stenwick: If I told you I loved you, would it even matter?
Ray Koval: If you told me or if I believed you?

Can you think of anything more satisfying than pulling a fast one on someone? It’s even more delicious when that particular someone is someone you care about or who has gotten you more times than you would like to remember. The look on their faces when they realize they’ve been had is worth every painstaking effort you had to make to pull it off. You would think then that DUPLICITY, a film in which two very likeable and sneaky folks, Julia Roberts and Clive Owen, who have proven chemistry together from working previously in Mike Nichols’ CLOSER, would be sticking it to each other so bad that you would delight in every jab they made at each other. Well, the ultimate joke would be on you then because, while writer/director, Tony Gilroy, positions DUPLICITY as a feisty heist movie by stepping up the cool factor any way he can, it is actually nothing more than a failed prank fallen flat on its pretty Hollywood face.


When we first meet Claire Stenwick and Ray Koval (Roberts and Owen), they are drinking it up in Dubai at the US consulate. She isn’t the least bit interested in him and he is working her as hard as he can. I didn’t hear it but he must have said the right thing at some point because they end up in bed together. Of course, she was only sleeping with him so that she could drug him and steal some super secret international spy stuff. And naturally, he put aside all of his super secret spy training and allowed himself to be taken in by her beauty. It is fleeting though - the moment, not her beuauty - and with very little chemistry or connection. Yet this is supposed to be the instance that binds the two in a lust that spans years and leads to what we’re told is true love. They reconnect years later in some other exotic shooting location and concoct a plan to dupe two high profile rival corporations (run by over acting Paul Giamatti and understated Tom Wilkinson) and make off with millions of dollars that will allow them to bask in exorbitantly rich bliss for the rest of their lives. It’s a fine plan but I wasn’t buying anything.


Gilroy’s last directorial effort was his first. MICHAEL CLAYTON earned him respect from critics and contemporaries alike as the film went on to earn a number of Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director for Gilroy himself. Gilroy enlisted some of the same players he worked with last time out, including composer, James Newton Howard, cinematographer, Robert Elswit and even Wilkinson rejoins the gang. How is it then that when all these folks got together last time, they achieved such subtle perfection while this time, Howard sounds as though he were ripping off the OCEAN’S 11 through 13 scores and Elswit is practically washed out? (Wilkinson is still great as he can do very little wrong in my book.) Perhaps the blame can be placed on Gilroy’s most tired screenplay in years. By keeping corporate espionage grounded in reality last time out, he made it fascinating and relatable. By infusing it with Hollywood convention, the whole game was played out before it even began.


DUPLICITY boils down to very little more than two pretty people running games on each other and anyone else they can. The trouble is that the games they’re running are amusing only to them and entirely transparent to the rest of us. The truly duplicitous nature of DUPLICITY it would seem is just that everyone on that side of the screen thinks they are so much funnier, so much sneakier and so much more dubious than what we on this side of the screen actually see. Once again, the cool kids are too ignorant to notice that they are nowhere near as cool as they think they are.

Revisiting MICHAEL CLAYTON

Written and Directed by Tony Gilroy
Starring George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton and Sydney Pollack


This Friday, Tony Gilroy's follow up to the Oscar nominated MICHAEL CLAYTON, DUPLICITY, hits theatres. Before Black Sheep takes a look at the repairing of Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, we would like to look back at Gilroy's thrilling directorial debut.

This is a movie about a man, precisely a man named Michael Clayton (George Clooney). The man behind the man is writer/director, Gilroy, (the man behind the words of another famous man you may know as the moniker of the Bourne series) and he is not the least bit interested in pandering to his first audience as a director. Each early scene establishes characteristics of Mr. Clayton’s personality that none of us would have necessarily expected. What we’re given is an intriguing, if not somewhat broken man, caught at a pivotal time in his life. The action does start shortly after all this establishment and while I may not have known Mr. Clayton to begin with, I certainly finished by wanting to know more.


Clayton is a lawyer who no longer litigates in a courtroom but whose major purpose is to clean up messes made by other lawyers in the firm that employs him. Originally, Clooney wanted to direct this project and had refused to star in it if it were to be directed by a first time director. Gilroy somehow convinced him of otherwise and it’s a very good thing he did. Clooney’s portrayal of Clayton is subtle and understated, certainly one of his finest. He is also surrounded by fiercely talented performances by Tom Wilkinson as a man on the brink of delusion and Tilda Swinton in an Oscar-winning performance as a corporate head who can barely keep that head above water. And while it is certainly the least showy performance, Sydney Pollack's turn as Clayton's boss should not go unnoticed as it was his last performance before his death last year.


Gilroy is one of the smartest writers in Hollywood these days and with MICHAEL CLAYTON, he reintroduces himself as an impressively meticulous director, crafting an intelligent thriller that brings more attention to the hero than most films do. By doing so, he makes it apparent that heroes are humans too and there is always more going on that you don’t know a thing about. I have now seen the film three times and it only gets better.

BLACK SHEEP @ THE 32ND ANNUAL TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL II

PERSEPOLIS and MICHAEL CLAYTON


Saturday was supposed to be my big movie day at the festival. The weather report was calling for rain and there were plenty of films playing all day that I was dying to see. There was just one small snag to get past. Going into the weekend, I only had one ticket purchased for the entire day and everything else I wanted to see was sold out. This brings me to my one complaint about the Toronto Film Festival. This is not a festival for the people. The regular filmgoer is first weeded out by the cost of a ticket. Regular screenings sell for $17.95 plus applicable taxes and service fees if purchased online. This may seem exorbitant but it is nowhere near as pricey as the cost of a gala or Visa screening. These elite projections go for $37.95. I suppose the rationale is that they are often high profile films having their world or North American premieres and will most likely be attended by the directors and stars. My Friday night alone, which consisted of just two films, cost me almost $85. That was hard to swallow at first but I became appreciative of these tickets as it was beginning to seem like they might end up being my only tickets. When the general onsale finally happened, there had been so many pre-sale opportunities for Visa gold or platinum customers that the only ticket I was able to get was to watch a restored print of Jean Renoir’s LA GRANDE ILLUSION. I spent the entire day trying to get through to the festival box office and when I finally did, the operator who had clearly had one of the longest days of his life, simply told me that if the website said the show was sold out, then it was. I was not amused as the website specifically referred me to the box office in the event the film had no tickets available online.


Tickets for gala screenings were going for as high as $400 dollars online. It was mind boggling to me that anyone would pay that much to see any movie, no matter who was going to be in attendance at the screening. I thought about this while I waited in the regular ticket holders line and watched all the Visa gold or platinum ticket holders walk past me into the theatre when many of them had not been there as long as I had. This was a festival for the privileged. I was certainly privileged to be there but not every cinephile can afford, or is silly enough to justify being able to afford, the prices at TIFF. Going to TIFF was, for many, not about the movies but rather about being seen at the movies. The privilege is not appreciating the film itself but rather telling your friends and colleagues that you caught the world premiere of this movie or that movie and you were sitting three seats away from Cate Blanchett when you did. Luckily for my day, I managed to find people online who were looking to unload their tickets to PERSEPOLIS and MICHAEL CLAYTON at prices that resembled what they paid for them (an easy $55 for the set). And fortunately for my piece of mind, I was sitting in front of two devout cinephiles at GRAND ILLUSION, who went on before the screening about the many films they had already seen so early into the festival and how great the festival was after so many years. The passion is still afire for those who can afford it. It was Tony Gilroy, MICHAEL CLAYTON writer/director, who said it best before his film screened that Saturday afternoon. It went a little something like, ”You are all so lucky to live somewhere where something like this takes place.” So true, Tony, considering I’ve heard it ain’t cheap to live there either.


PERSEPOLIS was by far the best film I saw at the festival. Based on Marjane Satrapi’s highly lauded graphic novel of the same name, PERSEPOLIS is her biographical account of what it was like growing up in Iran during both a revolution and a war. It is mostly black and white, entirely hand drawn and always captivating. Her story is heartbreaking and enlightening. As a precocious your girl, she was easily influenced by her surrounding family and their progressive, humanistic ideals. Her family had convictions and integrity and these were not so much passed on to Marjane so much as awakened within her at an early age. Despite an abundance of love surrounding her amidst such political turmoil, Marjane still develops into a very lonesome figure who goes inside of herself in search of understanding and does not return for many a year. Her journey is sometimes painful and sometimes hilarious but it is the intimate, personal frankness that makes you feel privileged for being privy to it. The richness of the story is only further enhanced by the stark beauty of the style. PERSEPOLIS is a unique experience that will find a special place in your soul while it exposes you to worlds unknown.


The festival has screenings all over town. They have a convenient online schedule that shows how long each film is and whether or not your choices will overlap but they often do not start on time and not being familiar with the terrain made it difficult to assess travel times between venues. I needed again to grab a cab to my next screening, MICHAEL CLAYTON, at Ryerson University, in order to make it on time. Luckily, I did, lucky for a couple of reason. First, I was able to find a reasonable seat and secondly, lucky because the movie was pretty solid. It is slick, stylish and stellar from the start but still somewhat unfocused. This is a movie about a man, precisely a man named Michael Clayton (George Clooney). Writer/Director, Gilroy, is not interested in pandering to his audience but it makes the beginning of his film a bit clunky. Scene after scene establishes characteristics of Mr. Clayton’s personality but this is before any of us has been given the chance to care to know anything about him. The action does start shortly after all this establishment and while I may not have cared to begin with, I certainly finished by wanting to know more. Clayton is a lawyer who no longer litigates in a courtroom but whose major purpose is to clean up messes made by employees of the firm that employs him. Gilroy is one of the smartest writers in Hollywood these days, having written the entire Bourne series. With MICHAEL CLAYTON, he tries his hand at directing and crafts an intelligent thriller that brings more attention to the hero than most films do. By doing so, he makes it apparent that heroes are humans too and there is always more going on that you don’t know a thing about.


While I may not have had the privileged experience those with more money and clout have at this festival, I must say that I certainly feel privileged for the opportunity to see such wonderful films. All in all, it was a beautiful day.
Next ...
Part Three:
3:10 TO YUMA
INTO THE WILD

THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM

Written by Tony Gilroy, Scott Z. Burns and George Nolfi
Directed by Paul Greengrass


Agent: Uh, sir, he drove off the roof.
Noah Vosen: What?
Agent: He drove off the roof.

Central Intelligence agent, Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), has found herself once again in a tiny room, surrounded by a team of people, all scrambling to track the notoriously elusive, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon). At this stage, bringing Bourne in is not just her job but an obsession, one that has gone far past the point of hunt and capture and developed into a need to understand the man himself. In Paul Greengrass’s THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, we are right there with her every step of the way. Only it’s a much more enjoyable experience for us than for poor Pam. We have the added advantage of being able to see both sides of this chase from where we sit. From this vantage point, we see the C.I.A. constantly miscalculating Bourne’s next move and, in what is perhaps their biggest misconception, mistaking Bourne for some sort of super human, incapable of infallibility. Jason Bourne is just a man. Yes, he’s an incredible specimen with quick reflexes, heightened intuition and kick-ass moves but he too is just trying to figure out the mystery of where he came from and who he is. How can the C.I.A. pretend to know Bourne when Bourne does not even know himself? The Bourne paradox is what makes Jason Bourne one of film’s most intriguing action heroes and THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM is a perfect answer to years of unanswered questions.


To recap, we first caught a glimpse of Jason Bourne in THE BOURNE IDENTITY (directed by Doug Liman). He had no idea who he was and it was exhilarating to watch him awaken to his special brand of fighting style, while still infuriating to watch his struggle to understand how he came to be so skilled. THE BOURNE SUPREMACY followed with a new director (Greengrass) and a depressing change in tone after the death of his girlfriend, Marie (Franka Potente), at the film’s onset. The film could not help but be a more sobering experience after that. THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM changes Bourne’s direction from less running away to more running towards. Tying all three films together is the constantly improving performance by Damon as Bourne. Damon brings a sleek brand of class to his characters in most of his films and he treats Bourne with a stealth speed and fiercely internalized stoicism. You might say he was born to play Bourne. His tormented mind has gone from wonder and awe in the unraveling of his rediscovered personality to a dark brooding. He has understood that getting close to others gets them killed and has cut himself off as much as possible to both avoid future tragedy and maintain his focus on the goal.

Another man who found a stronger focus this time around is director, Greengrass. His direction for SUPREMACY was at times difficult to follow. Not only was the story not told as succinctly as in Liman’s IDENTITY but Greengrass’s now signature extreme-shaky aesthetic and jump-cut obsession made it visually jarring as well. After snagging an Oscar nomination for his direction of UNITED 93 last year, he has learned a stronger command of his unsteady film approach. The result is a visually more engaging experience that ushers in a different kind of American cinema. The British director follows the action through numerous international locations, from running across rooftops and hopping through windows in Tangiers to zipping in and out of the crowds in a busy London bus station. The world flavour only further serves to highlight the film’s direct criticism of American home security practices post September 11th. Greengrass’s portrayal of the C.I.A. is one hyped up on power and the authority to kill anyone whenever necessary and that power reeks of paranoia. Making the C.I.A. the enemy makes our hero’s actions, choosing to spare life whenever possible, all that much more commendable. American cinema that makes Americans look bad is always refreshing. They’re not all bad but it’s obnoxious to pretend they aren’t somewhat bad.


The Bourne series should be commended for successfully accomplishing what so many others have recently failed at. It is a consistently enjoyable trilogy that never takes itself too seriously and has purpose in each installment that justifies the necessity of three films to tell a complete story, rather than just being an excuse to rake in more cash. They are all three intelligent and compelling works, with THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM serving as a smooth, sophisticated closer that is only disappointing because it draws the entire ordeal to a close. I would love to see the series live on but it will lack the one driving force that has made it so compelling for so long now. Now that Jason Bourne knows where it all began, he will no longer be in constant, compulsive pursuit of the ultimate puzzle, understanding himself. Is there any more gripping a pursuit to be had?