The Double

The second feature from Richard Ayoade (Submarine) is an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novella The Double, but it plays more like a hand-me-down homage to Franz Kafka, David Lynch, and Terry Gilliam. While exquisitely rendered in terms of its bleak, paranoid atmosphere, the film never fully engages the viewer nor instills in us any feelings beyond appreciation for the production design and 35mm cinematography. This disconnect may be attributable to the type of dystopic industrial workplace that the picture presents, which seems irrelevant in our current information age. The story’s themes about the loss of identity and free will and about the importance of the individual in the face of out-of-control bureaucracy play like the concerns of yesteryear. It’s not that these issues are no longer with us--in fact they have increased tenfold in the Internet age. It’s that the metaphorical depiction of these fears, via the film’s depiction of totalitarian oppression in a late-‘60s workplace, feels quaint at best. 

Another serious problem with the movie is its central character. Jesse Eisenberg plays Simon James, a weak, shy, unassertive everyman trapped in a monotonous job. He lives in a tiny apartment in a crumbing urban environment where the sun never shines. When a dynamic and fearlessly assertive new employee named James Simon (also played by Eisenberg) arrives, his life takes a serious turn for the worst. Eisenberg is a fine actor, but he only plays cold and cerebral characters, and this film needs warmth and humanity at its center to balance out everything else.

Ayoade succeeds well at evoking the visual style of the films he so clearly wants to emulate-- David Lynch’s Eraserhead, The Coen Brother’s Barton Fink, and especially Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (the most direct influence). But he and co-writer Avi Korine, seem to have missed the point that all those films would have become exceedingly boring by the halfway point without a main character we can relate to. In The Double, we don’t feel trapped in the character’s circumstances the way we do with Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) in Eraserhead. Nor are we baffled by what we witness all around us, as we are when seeing the world through the eyes of Barton Fink (John Turturro). And we don’t connect to the protagonist’s pain, anguish, and dreams the way we share those of Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) in Brazil. Each of those actors convey a tangible humanity in their performance that make us root for them, despite the fact that their characters are so passive. Each of those filmmakers created a world we’d never seen before. The character of Simon James is just a loser we don’t care about, living in a nightmare we no longer share.