Enemy

Much of the oblique psychological thriller Enemy—starring Jake Gyllenhaal—is beautiful to look at. The film has a bleached, sunlit veneer that feels definitively Californian. It’s actually set (and filmed) in Toronto, but a Toronto that feels very much like Los Angeles. Visually, Enemy appears to have been lifted partly from Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There’s a subtle paranoia throughout the film, and thematically Enemy is a kind of “body snatchers” riff; and the music (especially in the first half of the movie) has echoes of Bernard Herrmann’s haunting Vertigo score. But unlike either of those films, Enemy amounts to little more than a grimly self-serious curiosity piece. In it, Jake Gyllenhaal plays a history professor named Adam Bell who discovers that he has a doppelganger, an aspiring actor named Anthony St. Claire who has bit parts in several apparently direct-to-video movies. Anthony’s movies are something else, and probably the only clear joke of the film, with titles like Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way and Call Me L8er. They’re more like the bad, functional titles of sitcom episodes. And in each one, Gyllenhaal’s double has a classically clichéd bit part: man in lobby or man in taxi, or something like that.

What’s so hard to take is the sheer, inexplicable dread that each man feels for his double. In a film like Body Snatchers, we knew that behind the duplicates were aliens bent on extinguishing the human race. And in Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart’s fetishistic obsession was what gave the idea of the double a raw, intense horror. But no ideas of this kind are fleshed out in Enemy. And Jake Gyllenhaal, who’s a good actor and often a charming one on screen, doesn’t reveal anything about why these men are so freaked out about each other. His Adam Bell lives a pretty dismal, routine life as an academic, although he’s not a complete hermit like some scholars, enjoying the frequent visits of his lover (Melanie Laurent). And the actor Anthony St. Claire is living a seemingly charmed existence with his very pregnant wife (Sarah Godon) despite the fact that he hasn’t yet experienced a breakthrough as an actor. (How does he afford his nice apartment?) The movie never makes a case for why these men pose a threat to each other, but their hostility is intense and only increases throughout the film. (I suppose the very idea of a doppelganger is supposed to be seen as threatening enough to defy explanation. And that might be true in some cases, but the film could have just as easily explored the bizarre wonder that a phenomenon like this might inspire in two people, especially if the movie wasn't really going after the horrors of a Vertigo or a Body Snatchers type of story.)

The visuals in Enemy are almost always rich. There's a genuine tension to them. And yet, they fail to really build on each other. The film is visually lazy in a sense, perhaps a parallel form of the same blasé attitude that hinders its story and its logic. Instead, it merely exudes all of the quirky, eccentric qualities of an “indie” film. Case in point: the movie’s opening scene—in which Gyllenhaal (as the actor) attends a risqué backroom striptease act (in which the nude woman crushes a spider with one of her stilettos). That scene isn’t exactly clear, especially because we aren’t yet aware of the whole “double” component (unless we’ve read about the film prior). Then we meet Adam Bell, giving a lecture on the qualities of dictatorships. Why this particular subject? Is the director, Denis Villeneuve, trying to suggest an overarching theme here? Villeneuve doesn’t clarify much for us, although you feel that surely this talk, which is repeated later in a little montage sequence, must be relevant to the movie. 

But then, a movie doesn’t have to be completely lucid to be enjoyable, even marvelous. Months ago, we saw proof of that with the bonkers but mesmerizing Under the Skin, a movie that offered little in terms of plot or coherence, but was beautiful and captivating. Enemy tries to get that kind of response, but fails to do so, presumably because not even the director or the actors know what is going on in this film. Everyone is either confused or simply stoic, as if that bleached quality of the film had somehow seeped into the performances, the writing, the directing. 

Villeneuve directs as though he is unsure of how to respond to a very interesting premise. Finally one truly remarkable development comes when the men—so incredibly threatened by each other—ostensibly decide to Parent Trap their significant others, as a form of revenge on each other. It’s so weird and creepy that you don’t know exactly what to make of it. Perhaps it's the thrill of tricking one’s spouse, or maybe the curiosity of seeing if one of the girls will find out the truth. (One of them does, and when she asks Bell to stay, it’s all the more strange, and intriguing.) This one may warrant a second viewing after all, but as of now I'd classify it as too much of a missed opportunity.

With Isabella Rossellini as Adam’s mother. Scripted by Javier Gullón, from the 2002 novel The Double by José Saramago.

Now You See Me

In Now You See Me, four magicians have crafted a masterful bank-robbing caper that keeps the FBI (represented here by an agent named Dylan Rhodes, who's played by Mark Ruffalo) on its toes. It's certainly an impressively grandiose film, with an enormous cast: Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, and Dave Franco are the magicians; Melanie Laurent plays a French Interpol agent; Michael Caine plays an investor who's backing the magicians; and Morgan Freeman plays an ex-magician who's been making a new career revealing the secrets behind the magic tricks.

It's an entertaining movie, to be sure. The tricks are dazzling and the story holds you, sometimes even mesmerizes you, and it's funny. The problem is that ultimately it's another caper film, mixed with the plot of an NCIS or Law and Order episode writ large for the big screen. Nothing here is particularly new or innovative, except for the excessive cleverness of the tricks themselves, but it's hard to be impressed by anything in movies anymore when most of the stunts and other feats are performed by a computer.

That leaves us with the talented cast and the undernourished characters: the four magicians are reduced to stock treatment, which means we get Jesse Eisenberg's usual schtick: he speaks too fast and exhibits that same untempered arrogance he had when he played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network. Woody Harrelson never plays anyone but himself, but at least he's likable: the dumb-on-the-outside but sharp-on-the-inside cowboy. Only Ruffalo and Laurent, whose relationship develops the more they're thrown together by the investigation, have much room to grow, and the writers--Ed Solomon, Boaz Yakin, and Edward Riccourt--tend to cliches, such as a budding but suppressed romance.

Louis Leterrier's direction is sure-footed enough though. He's intent on showing us a good time, and for the most part he succeeds. Watching Now You See Me is like watching really entertaining trash on TV: no one is likely to remember it a year from now, but it's a welcome diversion from all the other summer fodder, which involve superheroes and the like. 115 min. ★★

Beginners

Too pretentious to be interesting. Beginners feels like a movie that's supposed to be good for you: it's full of realism, a somber dose of the tragedies of life and the breakdowns in human relationships that stay broken and unmanaged for years, often going to the grave that way, in a state of arrested development, shell-shocked critical condition. In that sense, Beginners has no actual feeling at all. We begin to acquire a sense of having been sedated as we watch real life unfold and wonder when the movie is going to start.

The story, which meanders with little actual purpose, can be summed up in about the sappiest, most harebrained fashion imaginable: it's about lost chances and new beginnings: 38-year-old Oliver can't seem to make a relationship last, so he's full of doubts when he falls for a French actress (Melanie Laurent). He's also trying to make sense of the loss of his parents within a relatively short span of four years (not to mention their cold and loveless relationship for 44 years, which he learns stemmed from his father's latent homosexuality). Bereft of his wife, the father (Christopher Plummer) comes out of the closet and embraces his inner Gay.

The movie reaches for something powerful and moving but stops short deliberately to avoid being pegged as sentimental or sappy. It wanders in search of the movie it refuses to become. We keep being confronted with these kinds of movies: they're largely independent, and they're largely marketed as some kind of realistic alternative to the high drama we saw in those glossy 1950's soapers, like All This and Heaven Too and Suddenly, Last Summer. Those movies hovered precariously into the atmosphere of camp, whereas movies like Beginners go the opposite way, reaching, rather limply, toward indifference. Maybe that's why Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven (2002) made such a strong impression on me. It was throwback to those 1950s movies where the emotions ran the gamut. If nothing else we could laugh at them. In Beginners it hardly seems appropriate. Like giggling at a funeral.

Anything, even camp, would be a refreshing change from Beginners, which stays comfortably at room temperature. The emotions are there, but they're stifled. We feel for the characters anyway, because director Mike Mills is adept at organizing the right images together (and he has a solid cast to work with). How could you not feel pity for a giddy, grandfatherly type--Captain Von Trapp, nonetheless--who's dying of cancer? There's a scene where he finds out it's too late to continue with treatment, and he has a painful, wrenching expression on his face: life has played a cruel joke on him, and we see the wretched irony in his expressions.

Seeing Beginners is neither cathartic nor entertaining, it's just a bummer. Especially if you were looking forward to your Friday night.

Side notes: the relationship between Oliver and his late father's Jack Russell terrier is the closest this film comes to being endearing. It's genuinely touching. Also, Mary Page Keller plays Oliver's mother in flashback, and her scenes are among the film's brightest spots. She's so jaded by the squeaky clean banality of domesticity--and the grim realities of a loveless marriage--that she likes breaking little social conventions just for the hell of it. Her son carries that tradition into his adult life, but somehow those scenes don't register as well, and the movie doesn't do enough of that--doesn't appropriate enough of that droll humor--to really get anywhere with it.