Above: Jesse Eisenberg stars as two different office drones in "The Double"
It’s probably premature to
proclaim “The Double” to be one of the year’s best films (especially since most
of 2014’s finest will likely get sandwiched into the awards season). Yet watching this riotous, sinister, and
gorgeous movie, I couldn’t help feeling effusive. From the first image of its protagonist,
Simon (Jesse Eisenberg) blankly staring at a subway wall to the final shot of
him smiling in an ambulance, the film seizes your attention, brutally and
excitedly.
Where is the credit due?
Notably to the movie’s director, Richard Ayoade, who made a successful
transition from actor to auteur in 2011, with his wondrously soulful comedy
“Submarine.” That film was about a
precociously manipulative boy, but “The Double” is about a man who is almost
painfully incapable of manipulation. Simon,
to his own misery, is nothing if not passive.
He’s bullied at work; he’s lonely at home; and his idea of romantic
overtures is spying on his pixie-ish neighbor and co-worker Hannah (Mia
Wasikowska) through a telescope.
For a time, it seems that Simon is doomed to a life of
subservient awkwardness. Yet then,
something happens—a man named James, who looks exactly like Simon, appears at our
hero’s workplace, charming the same obnoxious co-workers who’ve ignored Simon’s
very existence. Hilariously, no one
notices the resemblance between them, but James takes his less-suave alter ego
under his wing, instructing him in the delectably despicable art of people
pleasing. “Which one do you want?” he
asks Simon after seducing two women in a bar.
As the bond between these twin men tightens and splinters
(Mr. Eisenberg plays both Simon and James), the story begins to twist and turn,
in both startling and thoroughly predictable ways. Yet the style of the movie is anything but
rote. Just as “Submarine” unspooled in a
world of cassette tapes, “The Double” exists in a modern universe that that
looks like a retro cartoon of reality.
The nameless corporation where Simon and James work is like nothing out
of the Twenty-First Century—its cubicles are soaked in grimy, gothic shadows
and stocked with antiquated computers and other machines that roar and
bleep. “I love this show,” Simon beams
while watching a snippet of a “Star Trek”-like television series at a café. Yet the show doesn’t seem like fantasy
because Simon’s own world feels just as weird.
But what, you might ask, is the point of all this? To entertain, partly. Mr. Ayoade clearly knows that the exaggerated
gloominess of his mis en scene is part of the film’s gleeful comedy, as much as
his quest to continually humiliate his hapless hero is (in the opening scene,
Simon watches in horror as a train pulls away with his briefcase caught in the
door). And yet “The Double” is first and
foremost a satire. “You’re a non
person,” Simon is told by a lazy workmate (Noah Taylor). Soon, this utterance becomes
literal—eventually, Simon is told that his name is no longer in his company’s
computer system and therefore, he “doesn’t exist.” “But I’m standing right here,” Simon
protests.
Needless to say, Simon’s defense of his very being is
ignored. And I think that may be Mr.
Ayoade’s point. How, he asks, can anyone
exist in a world drowned by oppressive technology and absurd bureaucratic
politics? If you’re a shy, decent guy
like Simon, you can’t, according to “The Double.” In this bizarre (and frighteningly astute) parody
of the everyday, the only way to live is to do as James does—lie, cheat, and
charm your way through everything from career-boosting meetings with chuckling
executives to midnight sleepovers with the boss’ daughter.
There’s no denying the pessimism of this
perspective. Yet “The Double” is
anything but coldly inhuman. Simon’s
nobility may drop off over time, but the movie takes his anguish and loneliness
seriously. At once desperately in love
with and deeply afraid of Hannah, Simon becomes tortured by his indecisiveness,
thereby allowing his life to be toppled and then taken over by his doppelganger. And in the end, he almost triumphs…but loses
his goodness in the process. “I don’t
want to be a boy on a string,” Simon tells Hannah. But what makes the film so tragic is its
suggestion that anyone who cuts the strings will wake up with blood on their
hands.
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