Duplex (2003)

Danny DeVito's Duplex arrives from 2003, a moment when a studio black comedy could be built on the premise of murdering an elderly tenant and nobody in the room felt obliged to append a lesson. Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore play Alex and Nancy, a couple who buy a Brooklyn brownstone and discover that the rent-controlled woman upstairs will not die on schedule. The film's moral universe is thin by design. It wants laughs and mostly does not get them, which is a separate tragedy from any question of social consciousness.

On the matter of cultural inventory, the ledger is nearly blank. The cast is white to a degree that reads as an artifact of its era, with Robert Wisdom and Maya Rudolph drifting through minor roles that carry no commentary on their identity. Harvey Fierstein appears, and the film does nothing with that fact. Barrymore co-leads, but her character is a wife in a domestic farce, defined by her husband's deadline and her own fraying patience. No gender argument is advanced. No racial argument either. There is no environmental concern, no body-acceptance framework, no neurodivergent reading, no historical revision. The realtor and the police officer turn out to be con artists running a long scam on buyers, which is a plot twist and not an economic thesis. A predatory landlord is a punchline, not a manifesto.

The picture was a bomb, grossing nineteen million against forty, and Barrymore collected a Razzie nomination for her trouble. Ebert complained that the murder schemes fail to land because Mrs. Connelly remains irredeemably sweet, which is as good a diagnosis as any. The film lectures no one. It has no sermon to deliver, no audience to correct, no cause to advance. It simply exists, a curio from a period when a studio could greenlight cruelty for its own sake and let the marketplace render the verdict. That verdict came swiftly.