Richard Ayoade (2013)

The Double opens on a subway train.  This is nearly empty except for the film’s protagonist Simon (Jesse Eisenberg).  Underground is where he stays.   He’s on his way to work but when he gets there – after difficult negotiations with an unfriendly security man (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) behind a ticket-office grille – Simon has moved merely to a different part of the subterranean universe created by Richard Ayoade for this adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novella.   (Ayoade co-wrote the screenplay with Avi Korine.)  The shabby, superannuated interior of the train anticipates Simon’s workplace too – a distillation of soul-destroying office environments through the decades, with artefacts that include clunky antique computers, CCTV, plastic identity cards, and those pens on chains there used to be (maybe still are) in banks.   The workers also suggest different eras.  Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), the girl whom Simon longs for, could be modern.  An abandon-all-hope receptionist (Sally Hawkins) and an employee test supervisor (Lydia Ayoade, the director’s wife) have late 1950s/early 1960s costumes and hairdos.  Simon’s yellowish, dog-eared colleague Harris (Noah Taylor) looks to have been going moldy on the premises for aeons.   None of the other locations in the film – a restaurant, a café, Simon’s apartment – appears ever to have seen the light of day and the few outdoor sequences are nocturnal.   The cinematographer Erik Wilson, production designer David Crank, art director Denis Schnegg and set decorator Barbara Skerman-Helding have done a brilliant job in helping Ayoade to realise this drab, dystopian, totalitarian world.  The ominous, skittering music by Andrew Hewitt lends a hand too.  As a piece of design, The Double is a triumph but the design is dominant.  All the way through, you’re conscious of Richard Ayoade’s skill and cleverness yet his telling of the story of Simon James and his doppelgänger James Simon is affectless.

Ayoade’s orchestration of the performances in this film is no mean feat.  With the possible exception of Chris(topher) Morris, whose playing of an official is a bit too sharply satirical, all the cameos are good.  Those who appeared in Submarine – Paddy Considine, Yasmin Paige, Craig Roberts (in the small role of a young police detective here) and, especially, Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor – seem to get exactly what Ayoade wants.  His The IT Crowd co-star Chris O’Dowd does nice work as a male nurse.  American actors in the cast like Cathy Moriarty (an unhelpful waitress) and Wallace Shawn (a manager at Simon/James’s workplace) are effective too.   The role of ‘the Colonel’, a senior political figure whose photograph adorns the office walls, is small enough for James Fox not to be a problem; indeed, his smiling fatuity works well.   As Hannah, Mia Wasikowska is a witty and beguiling combination of radiance, friendliness and, from Simon’s point of view, unreachability.

Although Jesse Eisenberg is admirable in the lead(s), Ayoade makes things difficult for him.  The personalities of Simon and James replicate those of the two Golyadkins in Dostoyevsky:  Simon is subdued, fearful, doomed to anonymity; James is confident and extrovert, in due course aggressively so.  The pair wear identical clothes:  this makes it all the more incredible and, in Simon’s increasingly paranoid mind, alarming when those to whom he points out James don’t see any resemblance between them.  I imagine the identical outfits are designed to illustrate that how Simon/James appears – either as a nerd without a sartorial clue or as someone self-assured enough not to need to dress to impress – depends on your partial point of view.  But the casual dress and Eisenberg’s distinctive, alert face work against Simon’s appearing to be a hopeless case – and he differentiates Simon and James with a subtlety that’s counterproductive.  Peter Bradshaw’s admiring review in The Guardian concludes that the film ‘is very smart work’.  He means it as a compliment of course but The Double is too smart for its own good.

9 April 2014