Duplicity (2009)

Tony Gilroy's Duplicity arrives from 2009, a period when a Hollywood caper could still concern itself entirely with the mechanics of a con and the expensive hotels in which the con artists conduct their business. Julia Roberts and Clive Owen play rival spies who leave government service to fleece two consumer-goods conglomerates, and the film unfolds in a non-linear shuffle of double-crosses that rewards close attention and punishes it equally. The cast is white, the concerns are monetary, and the moral universe extends no further than the question of whether two attractive people can trust each other. There is little here for the cultural archaeologist.

The film does harbor a modest contempt for corporate behavior. Two chief executives, played with relish by Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti, wage a petty war over a product that turns out to be a baldness cure, and the punchline is that everyone involved is a fool chasing a lotion. This is a caper's cynicism, not a manifesto. It observes that businessmen are venal and leaves the observation there, content to let the audience chuckle rather than organize.

Miss Roberts, for her part, holds her own as a scheming operative who is never anybody's fool, though the film treats this as ordinary genre business, the standard sparring of two movie stars, not a statement of any kind. There is no broader social argument to be extracted from the proceedings, no lecture to endure, no lesson about the environment or the body or the mind. What remains is a well-tailored puzzle, performed by professionals, aimed at adults who enjoy being confused for two hours. It is a category of entertainment that has become scarce, and its scarcity is not a political matter. It is simply a matter of taste.