By Roger Ebert
Twins seem a source of strange power to people who are not one.
Part of it must be in our imaginations. We see a nod or a glance
between one twin and another, and we imagine some kind of telepathic
communication taking place, when in fact the whole transaction is
probably just ordinary body language.
Twins themselves always seem to keep some private place for
their twinship. They do not talk about it much. They begin sentences
that somehow seem to go nowhere, as if it is not quite possible to put
into words what this particular relationship means to them. Most of us,
I imagine, would like to have a twin; there is something awesome in the
thought.
"Dead Ringers" is the vulgar exploitation-movie title given to
David Cronenberg's new film, which was originally and more poetically
titled "Twins." It stars Jeremy Irons in a dual role as Beverly and
Elliot Mantle, brilliant twins who grow up to be brilliant
gynecologists. Beverly's name may be misleading; both twins are men,
and they are unusually close, so much so that they routinely pretend to
be each other.
The movie is not at all shy about exploiting the possibility
that a woman going to see one of these gynecologists might end up being
seen by the other. But that is only the beginning of their deception.
We discover that Elliot has always been the dominant twin, and that it
is his practice to seduce a woman and then turn her over to Beverly -
without telling the woman, of course. "You'd still be a virgin if it
weren't for me!" he cries.
One of their girlfriends (Heidi Von Palleske) catches on. She
is so genuinely in love with the one that she can detect the
substitution. Her "real" lover apologizes, but does he mean it? Who
would win out in such a tug-of-war? The girlfriend, or the twin? Then a
famous actress (Genevieve Bujold) comes to consult them about why she
cannot have children. The answer, in this most gynecologically precise
of movies, is that she has three openings to her uterus, and an
ambitious sperm is likely to get caught in traffic at the intersection.
Parts of the script seem lifted out of one of those women's magazine
articles that treat the reproductive organs like a biological subway
system.
Bujold begins a kinky love affair with Beverly, and shares not
only her body but her drug habit. The drugs seem to release the
craziness that has always been potential inside of him, and although
his twin tries to cover for him, their lives eventually fly into
pieces. In one particularly gruesome sequence, Beverly invents some new
surgical instruments that look like daydreams by the Marquis de Sade
and uses them in a bloody operation that looks like what you do to the
turkey before the stuffing goes in.
Does all of this work? On one level, it's like a collaboration
between med school and a supermarket tabloid. I saw it at the Toronto
Film Festival with several women friends, who said it was harder for
them to take than I, a man, could possibly imagine. But they were
fascinated while it was on the screen. The secret may be that
Cronenberg ( director of "The Dead Zone" and "The Fly") approaches his
trashy material with the objectivity of a scientist; it is his
detached, cold style that makes the material creepy instead of simply
sensational.
Of course everything depends on Irons' performances as the
twins. He is an intelligent, subtle actor, and he actually does succeed
in making the twins into substantially different people. In ways so
understated we are sometimes not even quite aware of them, he makes it
clear most of them time whether we are looking at Beverly or Elliott.
He develops them separately, so that the chaos at the end really works.
Cronenberg is a master of special effects, as he demonstrated
visibly in "The Fly" and as he demonstrates invisibly here. As everyone
knows, when the same actor plays two characters in the same scene, one
of the techniques used is the split screen. Clever viewers can usually
spot the line - usually hidden in shadow - where one part of the
picture ends and the other begins, but Cronenberg uses "moving splits"
to fool them. Using computer technology, he can move the position of
the split and the position of the camera at the same time, and he also
sometimes drops in the split after one of the characters has just
crossed the line where it will appear - so that we think that space is
"real." The result is that Irons convincingly appears as two separate
people, and not as trick photography.
The technical perfection of the film is not matched by its
emotional content. The story could have used more of the Bujold
character, who is sophisticated and worldly enough to understand the
twins, but who is dropped when they begin to retreat into their private
disintegration. "Dead Ringers" is a stylistic tour de force, but it's
cold and creepy and centered on bleak despair. It's the kind of movie
where you ask people how they liked it, and they say, "Well, it was
well made," and then they wince.
Dead Ringers (STAR) (STAR) 1/2 Beverly and Elliot Mantle Jeremy Irons Claire Niveau Genevieve Bujold Dr. Cary Weiler Heidi Von Palleske 20th Century-Fox presents a film directed by David Cronenberg, and produced by Cronenberg and Marc Boyman. Written by Norman Snider and Cronenberg, based on the book Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland. Photographed by Peter Suschitzky. Edited by Ronald Sanders. Running time: 115 minutes. Classified R. At local theaters.