Multiplicity (1996)

Multiplicity arrives from 1996 with the confidence of a studio comedy that has nothing on its mind beyond the mechanics of its own premise. Harold Ramis directs Michael Keaton as Doug Kinney, a Los Angeles construction worker whose job and family are incompatible, and who solves the problem by having himself cloned. The result is a farce about scheduling. It opened seventh against Independence Day and a Nutty Professor remake, and its reputation has not grown since. Placed against the current cultural ledger, it is a blank page, and the page is not hiding anything.

The film's gender play is the closest it comes to a theme, and that theme is a punchline. Rico, the clone who inherits Doug's softer side, cooks, cleans, and fusses over the household, and the film's position on this is that it is funny. Lance, the exaggerated masculine duplicate, chases women. Lenny, a copy of a copy, is dim, and his diminished intellect exists solely to fuel slapstick, with no interest in what it might suggest about a mind. Laura, the wife, is a study in frustration, and she sleeps with three of her husband's duplicates in sequence without noticing, which the screenplay treats as a complication and not a catastrophe. Nothing here is offered as argument. It is all material.

The resolution is entrepreneurial. Doug announces his own contracting business, and the clones decamp to Miami to run a successful pizzeria while passing as triplets. There is no economics to interrogate, no environment to fret over, no race in the frame, no effort at representation beyond a uniformly white cast in a comfortable suburb. The film asks nothing of its audience and teaches nothing. It is a movie about a man who could not find time to fix the house. Our instruments register silence, and there is something restful in that.