Duplicity

Sex, lies, and spies: Julia Roberts and Clive Owen con each other and some mega-corporations in 'Duplicity'

March 20, 2009|Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

In "Duplicity," Clive Owen looks like he just wandered in from the other thriller that has him trotting the globe in expensive-looking suits. "The International" is a business-like conspiracy thriller that opened last month and deserves a better audience than it's getting. "Duplicity" stands to get a fairer hearing, since, for one thing, it's more conventionally enjoyable and, for another, Owen's partner in entertainment is Julia Roberts, who has returned from wherever she's been to show the Jessicas (Alba, Biel, etc.) and Scarletts of the world how it's done.

Written and directed by Tony Gilroy, who also made "Michael Clayton," "Duplicity" is a twisty suspense comedy bobbing at the same end of the pool as certain Coen brothers' movies and those Steven Soderbergh "Ocean's" capers, which is to say that it's reasonable to expect George Clooney to show up and serve everybody mojitos.

And like "The International," "Duplicity" is also a business-like conspiracy thriller. But the conspiracy here is pitched in the key of romantic faith: "You're conning me!" "No, my love, you're conning me!" Rarely has distrust been trumped up as such a sex fetish.

Roberts and Owen play a pair of ex-agents - she was CIA; he was MI6 - using their years in government intelligence to make money as corporate spies. They meet at a party in Dubai and go to bed together. She steals Egyptian air defense codes from him. He spends the rest of the movie trying to wring an apology from her. He continues even after they've teamed up to exploit a product war between two mega-manufacturers (of toiletries and the like) for a multimillion-dollar payday.

Roberts infiltrates Manhattan's Burkett & Randall, whose regal titan, Howard Tully (Tom Wilkinson), runs his company as grandly as some of Shakespeare's kings lord their kingdoms. She's installed Owen into the team of casual surveillance experts whom Tully's rabid opponent, the unappetizingly named Dick Garsik (Paul Giamatti), has hired to steal B & R's secrets.

For the record, Roberts's character's name is Claire Stenwick, and Owen's is Ray Koval, but Gilroy maintains an air of mistrust so extensive that you don't believe anything they tell each other, starting with their names. In order to keep myself from getting hurt, they were just Clive and Julia to me. In order to keep myself from being confused, I tried to stop following the scrambled chronology and datelines -Rome, Geneva, San Diego, Dunwoody, Ga. When Owen tracks down Roberts in New York, five years after she betrayed him in Dubai, they have some lightning-round banter (he's hurt; she's sorry but she has no idea what he's talking about) that we hear them perform again, verbatim, in Rome, two years before that. What are they up to?