The downright vapidness of the character of Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg in one of dual roles) is best summarized in a nursing home scene with his aged mother. After she remarks that her favorite song is now playing, he coldly replies, “There is no song; and you hate music.” Simon will go on to frustratingly plod through a nondescript job and an even more bleak life. Then one day his doppelgänger, James Simon (Eisenberg) shows up as a new hire at work. He is everything Simon is not: charming, slick with both his boss and the ladies, and ruthless in his ambition. He makes every attempt to steal Simon’s ideas and present them as his own. Even Simon’s object of affection (Mia Wasikowska), thus far unmoved by Simon’s paltry advances, is fair game for James.
Eisenberg gives a tour de force performance as he slides back and forth from the meek and frustrated to the confidant and the bold. Simon’s amusing boss (Wallace Shawn) keeps forgetting who Simon actually is and when he remembers is quick to scold him for underperforming. The security guard at the entrance to his building repeatedly claims he never saw him before and makes him scan his ID when he enters.
The Double is a lot of fun for awhile, and in no small part due to the uncanny touches of art direction and set design provided by director Richard Ayoade. You can’t really tell where the film is taking place but it seems like the near future, yet it has many props of the past–not anachronisms but weird hybrids of what feels like a drab Eastern Europe or Russia vaulted into an oppressive-feeling future. Ayoade, a former stand-up comic and actor, instills a dark humor throughout. His mysterious use of a primarily Japanese soundtrack mostly works, especially when the early 1960s pop hit “Sukiyaki” bursts forth.
Yet Ayoade ultimately falls in love with the idea of a mystery within a riddle within a conundrum. The film seems too intricate by half, which is a shame given its earlier strengths. Eisenberg acts up a storm and Ayoade is definitely a talent, as he proved with his first film, Submarine, but for this viewer, there’s too much Terry Gilliam’s Brazil going on here. Thankfully, The Double also contains a heavy dose of David Lynch.
Don’t get the film confused with the current release The Enemy, also about a double. That film, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, is a far more serious, suspenseful Twilight Zone meets David Cronenberg affair. It too, let down at the film’s conclusion, but you could do a lot worse, given the year-to-date crop of films, than these two flawed but challenging odes to the doppelgänger phenomenon. The question of whether the double actually represents a character’s projection of his unfulfilled wishes for himself, is as old as the hills but strikes a chord in both films. While Simon’s plight in The Double may be as equally terrifying as Gyllenhaal’s, it doesn’t feel nearly as scary since The Double spends a lot of time draping Simon’s dilemma in quirky, fun Wes Anderson-isms. The juxtaposition of the serious and the tongue-in-cheek only works to a point here. Come payoff time my perception found itself transformed from engagingly bemused to emotionally detached.
The Double is loosely based on a Dostoyevsky novella; the Enemy, on an out-of-print novel by the Nobel-prize winning author, Jose Saramago. I wonder what market forces give when an award-winning author not only doesn’t receive a glittery “movie tie-in” reissue edition of his work, but actually goes ignored upon the release of a film adaptation
