The Double (2011)

The Double arrived in 2011 as a spy thriller assembled from dependable parts: a retired CIA operative, a rookie FBI agent, a Soviet assassin with a signature method of dispatch, and a senator with a slit throat. Richard Gere plays Paul Shepherdson with the quiet economy of a man who has done this before, and Topher Grace plays Ben Geary with the nervous energy of a graduate student who has read about it. The twist, delivered late, is that Shepherdson is himself Cassius, and that Geary is a Russian asset. It is the sort of reversal older pictures handled with a raised eyebrow. This one handles it with a straight face and a body count.

A survey of the film's cultural inventory returns very little. The women present are wives, agents, and bystanders, none of whom occasion commentary. Race does not arise as a subject. The environment does not appear. Wealth is not critiqued, nor labor, nor power in any structural sense. The antagonist is a Russian murderer, which places the film in a lineage of Cold War paranoia that predates the current cultural conversation by several decades. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no invitation to examine our assumptions. The director has cited The Conversation and Three Days of the Condor as influences. The film settles for being neither.

Critics were unkind. The approval rating sits near twenty percent, the box office was negligible, and the consensus held that the plotting was ludicrous and the characters hollow. We concur with the diagnosis while noting that hollow plotting is not evidence of ideological intent. It is evidence of a script written in 2004 and filmed seven years later, arriving in a marketplace that had moved on. The Double offers no instruction and no agenda. It offers a garrote watch, a shipyard, and a final ambiguity. That is all it has, and it is not enough.