It
was Nabokov’s favorite Dostoevsky work, but he might not have recognized this
vaguely British, boldly dystopian adaptation. Simon James is about to meet a
new co-worker with a familiar face, who will turn his drab little life upside
down in Richard Ayoade’s The Double (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
James
is a mousy Winston Smith toiling away in a soul-deadeningly bureaucratic data
processing firm. He works like a mule producing mountains of reports, but the
boss, Mr. Papadopoulos constantly belittles him, never even properly
remembering his name. Simon James initially befriends James Simon, his
relentlessly confident doppelganger, even completing his paper-pushing
assignments in exchange for advice on wooing Hannah, a pale young woman in the
copy department. Even though she lives across the courtyard from his
Soviet-style apartment building, she has only the barest awareness of James’
existence.
Naturally,
Simon soon starts pursuing him for his own satisfaction, while insidiously
undermining James’ already tenuous position with the company. As the put upon
James’ Orwellian world becomes increasingly Kafkaesque, he starts to act out of
desperation.
For
those who were less than charmed by Submarine,
Ayoade’s sad-eyed moppet coming-of-age tale, The Double will come as a pleasant shock. Even though it often
feels like the unauthorized sequel to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, there is a real vision thing going on here. Specifically,
the strategy of recasting Dostoevsky in a dystopian setting is a brilliant way
to still connect to the original story’s Russian-ness, while striving for
universality. After all, novels like 1984
and We were conceived as
Stalinist critiques, which suddenly seems highly relevant again given Putin’s
re-commencement of Russian May Day parades.
Similarly,
it is nice to see Jesse Eisenberg step outside his sheepish hipster comfort
zone to create two very distinctively pathological personas as Simon and James
(or vice versa). His two-handed scenes played single-handedly crackle with
tension and bite. Mia Wasikowska’s Hannah is rather drearily demure, but at
least she is a convincing blank slate for James to project his yearnings upon.
In contrast, Wallace Shawn and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith ham it up something fierce
as the company president and security guard, but the effect is much more
unsettling than funny-ha-ha.
