Starring: Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska, with Wallace Shawn, Noah Taylor, and James Fox.
Distributor: Madman Entertainment
Runtime: 93 mins. Reviewed in Jun 2014
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Not to be confused with a 2011 American spy movie of the same name, this British film is a dark drama that is based loosely on the 1846 novella, “The Double”, by the Russian author, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It is about a man driven to the edge of madness when he finds that his existence has been usurped by someone else.
Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg) is a lonely, shy, and self-effacing man, who most people ignore. He works in a government agency, that has something to do with data processing, where every day he has to identify himself as a worker. He is mis-understood by his own mother, and he is the kind of person who is asked to give up his seat to someone else on an empty bus. He feels permanently “incapable of what needs to be done”.
One day, he is stunned to find that a new employee in the place where he works, James Simon, bears a striking resemblance to himself. The two men, though, have different personalities. Simon is unassertive, deferential and awkward, while James is confident, popular and aggressive. Simon is interested romantically in a co-worker, Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), who lives in an apartment opposite his own, but he doesn’t know how to court her. James coaches Simon on how to get close to Hannah, and Simon, in return for James’ advice, does James’s work for him. James, however, takes credit for Simon’s work, and seduces Hannah. Simon’s mental stability is threatened by all that has happened, and Simon and James move to confront each other violently.
This is a film that capitalises on the tensions between the boredom of life, the clash of personality differences, one’s perceptions of sameness, and the constant threat of personal menace. In a technical sense, the movie conveys the darkness of its mood brilliantly. The camera-work is fluid and mirrors effectively the unsettled nature of both Simon’s and James’ personalities. The movie is claustrophobic, and colour is splashed onto the film’s minimalist sets to enhance its impact. Helplessly, Simon watches James wooing women through his binoculars, across apartments. The scenes remind one of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” (1954), and similar to Hitchcock, Richard Ayoade, the film’s Director, frequently injects black humour into his film in a playful, unsettling way.
One of the special characteristics of Dostoyevsky’s brilliance is his ability to capture what is completely idiosyncratic to the personality he is writing about. Films can always differ from books, but in this respect at least a film based on Dostoyevsky’s writings should aim to capture what makes a person essentially different from other people. It is a special challenge when a main character is the double of someone else. The resolution of similar physical appearance with personality distinctiveness necessarily rests in the capacity to portray an “unique” configuration of what makes one person separate from another. In this film, the appearance of differences creatively fuses with the perception of physical sameness.
Eisenberg is particularly impressive in the main role. He takes the parts of both Simon and James with flair, and he demonstrates the ability to make the two men distinct while nevertheless looking the same. We see a mild-mannered, frustrated man and an aggressive, manipulative one, working out dramatically their neuroses together. Even though Simon and James behave very differently, Ayoade astutely makes them both look risky and dangerous in their own way.
This is a boldly intelligent movie that impresses in style. It builds up tension in an original way, is directed smartly, and Ayoade brings imagination to the film by virtue of the paranoid fantasies that he develops meticulously. The film becomes a surrealistic experience for the viewer, who must try to cope with perceptions of sameness and difference in a world that is filled with sinister, dark and unusual happenings.
When the final showdown comes, one becomes very uncertain about who is the winner in the film’s bitter battle of idiosyncrasy – Simon James, or James Simon.
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