Enemy, directed by Denis Villeneuve
(R, 90 minutes)
"Chaos is order waiting to be deciphered" is the epigram for Denis Villeneuve's Enemy, and while the film doesn't cite its source, it's from Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago's The Double, upon which the movie is based. Saramago is a lot of things, including a Nobel Prize winner (for 1998's Blindness), but subtle isn't one of them. And the epigram is one of those statements that feels so true as to seem facile: Order is not reality, and it's certainly not truth. It's just a narrative we impose on randomness to help ourselves sleep at night.
Villeneuve has transposed the film, which concerns a pair of doppelgangers, from some unnamed sprawling metropolis to a concrete-colored Toronto and injected the film with a distinctly Canadian feel. His characters behave nothing like Americans, and maybe nothing like actual people would in the real world. But that's Saramago; he's hardly Emile Zola.
Adam, a depressive history professor, and confident Anthony, a small-time film actor who nevertheless seems to live large, are portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal, who differentiates between them by subtle shifts of body language.
Associate professor Adam is slogging through the everydayness of his life, delivering the same lectures all day, then returning to the same bland high-rise apartment every evening, when he's eventually joined by his girlfriend (Melanie Laurent), with whom he shares sad dinners and sadder sex. One afternoon he's accosted in the faculty lounge by a co-worker who makes a movie recommendation. While Adam admits he "doesn't really like movies" he goes to a video store and rents a copy of the film.
It's not much of a movie but something about it bothers him. So he gets up in the middle of the night and watches it again and spots his exact double, playing Bellboy No. 3. Adam is thoroughly freaked out by the existence of his clone. He rents Anthony's other movies and eventually tracks the guy down.
Perhaps Adam is Anthony, perhaps he's a split personality who has just discovered what the other half of his divided self has gotten up to. But around the 30-minute mark the movie switches to Anthony's perspective. There are indeed two men, identical in every way except for their minds and experiences.
If you're the sort who goes into the multiplex looking for tidy answers, then Enemy is liable to leave you baffled, if not angry. Things get progressively weirder, propelled by the atonal score by Saunder Jurriaans and Danny Bensi and a cool diffuse light that reveals Toronto as a city of fascist architecture as we near the end. But for all its feints toward the surreal, Enemy never quite achieves its ambitions.
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Rob the Mob (R, 104 minutes) This crackling-bright comedy drama, based on a true story, is loaded with charm and sassy dialogue, thanks to the interplay between its two main characters. After paying the price for their petty crimes, dimwitted outlaw lovers Tommy (Michael Pitt) and Rosie (Nina Arianda) decide to go straight. They land jobs at a debt-collection agency, but pretty soon Tommy is sneaking off to attend the trial of notorious hit man Sammy Gravano, whose testimony drops a casual reference to a no-guns policy at Mafia social clubs that gets Tommy thinking about a way to make some money. With Andy Garcia, Ray Romano, Griffin Dunne; directed by Raymond De Felitta.
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MovieStyle on 06/27/2014