Duplicity

Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton was the most assured and effective studio debut for a writer-director in recent memory.  Clayton examines the moral toll suffered by those who live in the dubious moral universe of big business exigency.  Gilroy's new film, Duplicity, once again uses a background of corporate espionage to tell a story of character's going through existential crises, but this time he's playing it for funsies.  Instead of a agribusiness giant that sanctions murder and knowingly inflicts Midwestern farmers with cancer, the corporation in question this time around is involved in the lower stakes world of shampoo and face creams.  Julia Roberts and Clive Owen play former spooks who team up to steal trade secrets from a cosmetics company run by T0m Wilkinson.  It's sort of a low wattage Ocean's Eleven with Gilroy even supplying some of Steven Soderbergh's trademark retro camerawork.  The most interesting part of the movie is Roberts' and Owens' relationship, which is based on so many betrayals and doublecrosses that the two are incapable of trusting each other, even as they fall in love.  Other than that, the caper plot is somewhat clever without ever really feeling urgent, and it sure doesn't help that Julia Roberts is her usual dull-as-dishwater self, completely incapable of portraying the sort of seductive iciness the part calls for.  Her crumminess is made up for by typically good work from Owen and Paul Giamatti as Wilkinson's chief rival. Still, one hopes that Duplicity is a throat-clearing for Gilroy rather than a declaration of intent; the world doesn't really need somebody to direct Ocean's Fourteen if Soderbergh pulls a hammy.