Moonlight Mile

Brad Silberling got his start directing television shows like Doogie Howser, M.D. and NYPD Blue before making the jump to feature movies with studio fare like Casper (1995) and City of Angels (1998). It wasn’t until Moonlight Mile (2002), however, that he finally had something personal to say. The film was loosely inspired by the grieving period he went through after his then-fiancée, actress Rebecca Schaeffer was murdered by an obsessed fan in 1989. It featured then-up-and-coming actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Ellen Pompeo alongside veteran actors Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon delivering thoughtful performances in this moving story.

It's in 1973 and Joe Nast (Gyllenhaal) is staying with Ben (Hoffman) and Jojo Floss (Sarandon) after the death of his fiancée and their daughter. Ben copes by keeping busy, micromanaging the funeral and the reception afterwards while Jojo suffers from writer’s block. Joe sticks around because he doesn’t know what else to do, feeling like he’s the last link to their daughter, even staying in her room. While trying to retrieve wedding invitations from the local post office, he meets Bertie Knox (Pompeo), who helps him out. They gradually become attracted to one another but they both harbor painful secrets that hold them back.

Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon are believable as a married couple from the short hand they have between each other, like how Jojo frequently reminds Ben to lower his shoulders. It is these little, personal touches that provide valuable insight into their relationship. It is also interesting to see how they cope with the grief of their child’s death in their respective ways. Ben is all nervous energy and tries to keep busy, pushing the grief down deep so that he doesn’t have to deal with it. Jojo, however, channels her pain through anger and bounces it off Ben in little ways that are familiar to anybody’s who’s been married for a decent amount of time. Sarandon excels at playing this no bullshit kind of character and it juxtaposes well against Hoffman’s internalized bundle of energy.

Jake Gyllenhaal is decent as the bewildered fiancé trying to make sense of it all – his feelings for his fiancée, his responsibility towards her parents and what he’s supposed to do next – and Bertie comes along and shakes it all up. Joe is wracked with guilt over a secret he’s keeping from Ben and Jojo and it’s tearing him up inside. Gyllenhaal does an excellent job conveying this internal conflict. He delivers an impressively nuanced performance and at such a young age.

The lovely, pre-Grey’s Anatomy Ellen Pompeo plays Joe’s alluring potential love interest that is harboring deep, personal feelings of loss herself. Like Joe, she’s damaged and adrift in life and this draws them together. The actress conveys a fragile vulnerability under a tomboy façade that is intriguing to watch.

In 1989, Brad Silberling was a film graduate with a promising career directing T.V. he was engaged to 21-year-old actress Rebecca Schaeffer. One day, she was shot and killed by a crazed fan. Silberling remembered, “The moment this happened, there was a voice in my head saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’” He moved into her parents’ house in Oregon, staying there for several months while he tried to figure out what to do next and comfort them during this dark time.

Four years later, he channeled this experience into the screenplay for what would become Moonlight Mile (originally entitled, Babies in Black). Silberling said, “Like the girl in the film, Rebecca was an only child with parents who were vital and interesting. I didn’t know them very well and, suddenly, we were thrust into a unique type of intimacy in which the boundaries were unclear and the expectations hazy.”

He didn’t have an easy time of getting it made. Even after back-to-back hits with Casper and City of Angels, it took years for Moonlight Mile to get made. Four studios passed on it, including DreamWorks who felt it was too close to American Beauty (1999). Studio executives didn’t know how to market it as Silberling said, “They’re stumped by stories that are character-driven and don’t box themselves up neatly.” It wasn’t until Susan Sarandon and then Dustin Hoffman agreed to do it that financing came through. Initially, Hoffman turned it down in 1998 but changed his mind two years later when the filmmaker pitched to him again. The actor said, “Hearing Brad talk about it – I detected a yearning in him. He wanted to make this movie to figure something out.” Silberling’s agent contacted Disney’s studio chief and gave him 24 hours to decide on the $20 million film. He agreed to bankroll it in the fall of 2000 with principal photography taking place in the spring of 2001.

Moonlight Mile received mixed reactions from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “Moonlight Mile gives itself the freedom to feel contradictory things. It is sentimental but feels free to offend, is analytical and then surrenders to the illogic of its characters, is about grief and yet permits laughter.” In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote, “Yet somehow the director has put together a collage of period music without succumbing to the usual classic rock clichés, and he has a good instinct for the ways people use pop music to communicate and to express emotions they can’t quite articulate. In fact, if they articulated them a little bit less, Moonlight Mile would be a stronger movie.” The Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan wrote, “Silberling has crafted a good number of strong, memorable moments—a barroom dance set to the Rolling Stones title song is particularly nice—but finally the presence of real feelings underlines what’s missing when they’re not there.” Finally, Entertainment Weekly gave it a “C+” and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Joe’s cleaving to his replacement parents, letting himself replace the child whose loss they have yet to confront, is a sticky, fraught situation that Silberling reduces to a pileup of TV episodes.”

I’ve always been a sucker for small-town American slices of life stories and Moonlight Mile is one that stayed with me for days. Even though it’s set in ’73, Silberling doesn’t hit you over the head with period details, letting the soundtrack, populated by Sly and the Family Stone, T-Rex, Van Morrison, and others do that instead. He focuses on the characters and their dilemmas, which are compelling in their own right. The music compliments them and so we get a touching moment when Joe and Bertie slow dance to “Moonlight Mile” by the Rolling Stones or when they drive off to an uncertain future to the strains of Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing.”

What makes this film distinctive from others of its ilk is how personal it feels, from the song choices to the specific behavior of the characters. This doesn’t feel like some generic studio movie – it is a personal statement from someone that had to make it. It’s a film that features characters dealing with grief and guilt and trying to communicate these feelings with others. It also explores the real need for personal connection and how that can help people open up and be vulnerable, which helps deal with their personal traumas. How does one go on with their life after the death of someone close to them? Everyone has their own way of dealing and Moonlight Mile shows several coping methods – none of them are easy. This film was a highmark for Silberling and after its commercial failure (it was the victim of a studio regime change), he went back to standard studio fare and directing T.V. It’s a shame he hasn’t found anything as personal and moving as this film but it remains a poignant tribute to Rebecca Schaeffer’s memory and that part of his life.

SOURCES

Diaconescu, Sorina. “All the Way Back.” Los Angeles Times. September 22, 2002.

Ojumu, Akin. “The family that grieves together…” The Guardian. February 15, 2003.

Waxman, Sharon. “A Director’s Longest Mile.” Washington Post. September 29, 2002.

The Day After Tomorrow

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of the Nature's Fury blogathon over at the Cinematic Catharsis blog.

I’m a sucker for disaster movies. The appeal of them is that they make me wonder, how would I handle such a dire situation? What would I do? Then, I get to play armchair quarterback and criticize all the mistakes the characters make in the movie. If I had to narrow it down, my favorite disaster movies are from the 1990s where every year it seemed like there were dueling efforts from rival studios – Independence Day (1996) vs. Mars Attacks! (1996), Volcano (1997) competed against Dante’s Peak (1997), and Armageddon (1998) went up against Deep Impact (1998). During this decade and beyond, Roland Emmerich was the reigning king of disaster movies with the aforementioned ID4 and Godzilla (1998). I’d wager he has killed more people in his movies than almost any other mainstream filmmaker.

My favorite movie of his is The Day After Tomorrow (2004), which wasn’t released in the ‘90s but feels like a holdover from that decade. Not since Armageddon has a film taken such a complete leave of its scientific senses. By that point, he had already blown up the White House and stomped all over New York City. What was left? How about a modern ice age that engulfs the northern hemisphere all over the world? At the time, people laughed it off as yet another far-fetched disaster movie from Emmerich but over the years, as our weather has gotten more erratic and the polar ice caps are melting, it is looking less and less like science fiction and more like something that could actually happen only much slower than what is depicted in the movie. Maybe he was onto something.

Emmerich doesn’t waste any time. Four minutes in and already people are in peril as climatologist Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) saves a colleague from being swallowed up by a seismic event as the Larsen Ice Shelf in the Antarctica breaks off and then risks his own life to retrieve some core samples. He is one of those savvy scientist protagonists that really knows what’s going on but can’t get the powers that be to take his theories seriously and so he’s shutdown at a United Nations conference about the alarming increase in global warming, or abrupt climate shift.

Of course, none of the politicians give him the time of day but we know that he’ll soon be vindicated when all hell breaks loose. I mean, it is snowing in New Delhi fer crissakes! Before long, grapefruit-sized hail pelts citizens in Japan as the movie’s body count begins. Soon afterwards, four tornadoes wreak havoc in Los Angeles erasing the Hollywood sign. Finally, the mother of all tsunamis pummels New York City.

The rest of the movie sees Emmerich juggling several storylines: Jack and his two assistants making their way across the eastern seaboard now buried in snow and ice. Jack’s wife Lucy (Sela Ward) is taking care of a terminal patient. Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), their son, and his friends are trapped in New York City having taken refuge in the New York Public Library. The most engaging storyline is Jack’s perilous journey, which has a grim action/adventure vibe as they navigate the dangers of the harsh environment that shows the extent of the new ice age they are experiencing.

Dennis Quaid brings his patented everyman charm to the role of Jack. I always liked him, from early roles in Breaking Away (1979) and Dreamscape (1984), to later work in Traffic (2000) and Far From Heaven (2002). He turns in good work as Sam’s estranged father who is too busy trying to warn influential politicians about climate change than being a good father. The actor gets the most out of small, character moments like the scene where Jack drives Sam to the airport. It effectively establishes their relationship and lets us know that he’s a good guy but needs to get his priorities straight, which, conveniently enough, this massive global disaster will allow him to do. Quaid is good at delivering dramatic dialogue like, “I think we are on the verge of a major climate shift,” and really sells it with utter conviction, and cliché lines like, “If we don’t act now it’s going to be too late,” and actually make it sound important, which is exactly what you want from your leading man.

Like Quaid, Jack Gyllenhaal works hard to deliver a performance clearly superior to the material he’s given. The actor uses his big, expressive eyes and youthful appearance to maximum effect, playing an inexperienced young man forced to grow up really fast. Soon, Sam is following in his father’s footsteps as he ventures outside to find medicine for one of fellow students and romantic crush Laura (played by fresh-faced ingénue Emmy Rossum). It leads him to a Russian cargo ship that was swept inland on the massive tsunami and froze itself close to the library. However, it isn’t that easy and he has to contend with a pack of wolves that escaped from the zoo, which Emmerich mines for every ounce of tension.

Veteran character actor Ian Holm gets to intone the movie’s initial warning that something bad is going to happen thus validating Jack’s theory. Sela Ward does a nice job of conveying selfless empathy towards her patient, doing her best to cut through Emmerich’s audio/visual emotional manipulation by keeping it real with a grounded performance.

Nitpicking a brainless big budget movie like this is a lesson in futility but there are some things that just take you right out of the movie because they are so glaringly obvious. First jump in logic: Jake Gyllenhaal is supposed to be a 17-year old high school student?! Too bad in real life he was 24-years-old. Maybe he’s following in the footsteps of Luke Perry in Beverly Hills 90210? Second jump in logic: the L.A. basin by nature is not realistically conducive to tornadoes because of its geography. But then the first warning sign should have been Perry King cast as the President of the United States. I guess Morgan Freeman or Bill Pullman were not available.

Also, we are supposed to believe that a beautiful young woman like Laura would pass up a good-looking guy like Sam in favor of some smug jock from a rival school? He’s probably rich but still. Thankfully, there are occasional glimmers of wit like when a Culture Club song plays at the post-academic tournament reception causing Sam to remark, “This place is so retro it might actually be cool if it were on purpose.” Gyllenhaal delivers this line with perfect comic timing and deadpan delivery. In a nice throwaway gag, Sam’s nametag reads, “Yoda.”

Admittedly, there are some impressive visuals on display here as Emmerich gets to play in an expensive CGI sandbox, unleashing tornadoes in L.A., giving us a money shot of four separate twisters wreaking havoc and in a lame fuck you to the industry as one takes out the Hollywood sign. This is just a warm-up for an impressively staged set piece when a massive tsunami slams into and floods New York City with Sam and his friends narrowly escaping its wrath, finding refuge in the New York Public Library. It’s quite a sight to see massive amounts of water engulfing the streets, tossing city buses like tinker toys. It also gives Sam a moment to heroically save Laura when she stupidly goes back to a taxi for some lady’s passport (really?!). For someone so book smart she has zero common sense. The moment exists so that Laura can see what a great guy Sam is and then we get a scene where the smug preppie is humanized as he tells Sam to tell Laura how he feels. Aw, how nice.

Emmerich is also quite adept at creating an eerie mood with an ominous shot of hundreds of birds fleeing across the New York sky or having an abandoned Russian freighter float ominously down the streets of New York. However, after the CGI-created natural disasters subside, the film settles into a ploddingly predictable adventure movie with the cast of talented actors doing the best they can with a weak script in dire need of doctoring.

The Day After Tomorrow is a predictable mixed tape of Twister (1996), Deep Impact (1998), and The Perfect Storm (2000). If you can get past the gaping plot holes and jumps in logic then you might enjoy this throwback to disaster movies from a bygone era – think Irwin Allen in the 1970s but only if he had CGI at his disposal. While its message of global warming is timely and even more relevant now, the obvious way it force feeds it to the audience is insulting to anyone with a shred of intelligence. It seems to suggest that the moral of its story is if you want to avoid a natural disaster, go to a library.

Brothers

So far, most films about the current war in the Middle East have not fared well at the box office with efforts like Home of the Brave (2006), In the Valley of Elah (2007) and Stop-Loss (2008) getting limited distribution or underperforming at the box office (or both), often garnering little interest with mainstream audiences. People don't want to be reminded of the problems we face over there or the effects of it here at home when our soldiers return. To counter this attitude with his film Brothers (2009), director Jim Sheridan cannily cast marquee names like Natalie Portman, Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal in an attempt to appeal to a mainstream audience. A remake of Susanna Bier's 2004 Danish film Brodre, Brothers performed modestly well at the box office, but was largely unseen and remains an absorbing look at just not what soldiers go through, but how their loved ones deal with them once they get home. It also features powerful performances from the three aforementioned lead actors.

Captain Sam Cahill (Tobey Maguire) is a United States Marine heading back to Afghanistan for another tour of duty. He’s a loving family man with a beautiful wife named Grace (Natalie Portman) and two adorable daughters, Isabelle (Bailee Madison) and Maggie (Taylor Geare). Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman are instantly believable as a married couple that clearly loves each other. There is a familiarity that couples have and even though they don’t have much screen-time to convey it before Sam ships off, they pull it off in the way their characters look and interact with each other. In contrast, his brother Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) has just been released from prison after serving time for armed robbery. He’s the black sheep of the family and Grace doesn’t think too highly of her husband’s brother, but is nice to him in person. While Sam and Tommy get along fine there is tangible tension between their father (Sam Shepard) and latter. This is evident in an uncomfortable family dinner where their father makes it known that he sees Sam as a hero for serving his country and Tommy as a disappointment, causing the latter to make a scene. You can cut the tension with a knife during this scene until Tommy’s controlled outburst brings long simmering resentments to the surface.

While on a mission over hostile territory, Sam’s helicopter is shot down and he’s presumed dead. Sheridan makes the right choice when depicting the standard scene of the wife being told that her husband has been killed by showing Grace coming to the door and breaking down once she sees the military officers. No words need to be said and the scene ends there because Portman’s reaction says enough. Instead, Sheridan shows Grace’s full-blown emotional breakdown when Tommy stops by later that night to return Sam’s truck. Rather than console her, he erupts in anger and storms off. It’s an odd reaction, but in character as Tommy is clearly someone with a lot rage inside of him.

Tommy starts spending more time with his brother’s family, helping around the house and the rest of the film plays out the growing attraction between him and Grace. Meanwhile, Sam survives the attack on his helicopter and is being held prisoner and tortured.

Natalie Portman turns in a wonderfully nuanced performance as a woman trying to process the unbelievable grief she is experiencing. There are scenes where you can see Grace putting on a brave face for those around her, especially her children, but every so often she lets it slip and reveals the hurt that exists under the surface. For example, there is a scene where everyone throws a surprise birthday party for Grace and as she’s about to blow out the candles on her cake. There is a moment where she has a distant, haunted look before catching herself and regaining her pleasant façade. It’s a nice bit of acting from Portman and throughout the film she conveys a complex range of emotions as the actress shows how Grace processes the grief of her husband’s death and her emerging, conflicted feelings for Tommy.

Brothers is a slow burn, slice-of-life film as Sheridan dives deep into this family, examining the dynamic between Tommy and his father, a veteran of the Vietnam War. There are hints that his strict, perhaps even abusive style of parenting pushed Tommy to the kind of life he leads – an aimless ne’er’-do-well with a past full of regrets. The more time he spends with Grace and her daughters, the more of an influence they have on him. They provide a stabilizing effect by giving him a sense of purpose. Jake Gyllenhaal does a nice job of conveying Tommy’s inner turmoil, which he carries around with him. Initially, he gets to play the brooding, moody brother, but over the course of the film he transforms into someone who is more open and responsible. It’s a natural progression that the actor conveys expertly.

Tobey Maguire’s character also undergoes a transformation from genial family man to paranoid soldier suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder after spending several months as a prisoner of war. The actor goes through an impressive physical transformation as Sam is beaten and deprived of sleep so that he becomes a shadow of his former self. He does what he has to do in order to survive. If Brothers has a flaw it is that too much time is spent in Afghanistan showing how Sam’s humanity is stripped away by his captors. I understand the purpose of these scenes – they explain his behavior later on when he finally returns home, but as they continue and Sam’s situation gets bleaker, the balance that Sheridan has maintained up to this point is threatened. The Afghanistan scenes could have been left up to our imagination and conveyed through well-written expositional dialogue delivered by the talented Maguire.

As he demonstrated with In America (2002), Sheridan has a real affinity for getting naturalistic performances out of child actors and Brothers is no different, especially from Bailee Madison who plays the slightly older of the two daughters. Isabelle is more aware of what is going on and that something isn’t right with her father. This realization, as it plays briefly over her face in one scene, is absolutely heartbreaking. As a result, she is more emotional than her happy-go-lucky sibling. Madison really stands out during a tense dinner scene towards the end of the film when Isabelle intentionally baits her father. She is acting out, like a petulant child, but is also the only one in the family who has the courage to address the big elephant in the room – Sam’s increasingly erratic behavior.

Originally, Jim Sheridan was writing a story about two brothers growing up in Ireland but couldn’t get the financing for it. He ended up watching Susanna Bier's 2004 Danish film Brodre and liked it so much he thought it could be remade for North American audiences, changing the emphasis from an illicit love triangle to that of the family. Jake Gyllenhaal was the first actor to sign on, followed by Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman. 

At the time she signed on to do Brothers, Portman made a conscious decision to pick more mature roles: “I’m trying to find roles that demand more adulthood from me because you can get stuck in a very awful cute cycle as a woman in film – especially being such a small person.” To prepare for the part, the actress met with Army wives in order to understand how they managed their lives. She also bonded with the young actresses playing her daughters by having them over for baking parties and hanging out with them between takes. She and Maguire were able to play husband and wife so well because they had known each other for 14 years prior. She said, “Just knowing someone for that long is great history to have when you’re walking on set and playing husband and wife.” In addition, she had also known co-star Gyllenhaal for ten years.

During rehearsals and on set, Sheridan played a live version of Bruce Springsteen’s “The River” to get Gyllenhaal in the mood of a scene where Tommy and Grace share a quiet moment together. For Gyllenhaal, the song reminded him of the connection to his family, in particular his father. In working with the child actors, Sheridan had his own specific method: “what I do is present a scene to them as a problem, a kind of puzzle, and then ask them questions, what they think the character is thinking, or wants to do.”

Brothers received mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave it three-and-a-half out of four stars and praised Maguire’s performance: “This becomes Tobey Maguire’s film to dominate, and I’ve never seen these dark depths in him before. Actors possess a great gift to surprise us, if they find the right material in their hands.” In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote, “And Brothers itself – a smart, well-meaning project – never quite pulls itself together. It has a vague, half-finished feeling, as if it had not figured out what it was trying to do. Which may amount to a kind of realism – an accurate reflection of where we are in Afghanistan.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C+” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Brothers isn’t badly acted, but as directed by the increasingly impersonal Jim Sheridan, it’s lumbering and heavy-handed, a film that piles on overwrought dramatic twists until it begins to creak under the weight of its presumed significance.”

USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and Claudia Puig wrote, “Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare are excellent as Sam and Grace’s young daughters, derailed by their dad’s scary bouts of anger and his newfound coldness. The youthful portrayals recall the indelible roles of the young daughters in Sheridan’s wonderful 2003 film, In America.” The Los Angeles Times’ Betsey Sharkey wrote, “There will be echoes of that passion and poignancy in Brothers. But unlike the clear voice of those earlier films, Sheridan seems as conflicted as the Cahills about their virtues and failings.” Finally, in his review for the Washington Post, Michael O’Sullivan wrote, “Brothers is depressing as hell. And, like most war movies these days, it ends on a note that’s far from hopeful. But it’s good, and wise, and it feels true. Meaning, it hurts.”

Brothers is a fusion of Sheridan’s fascination with people put under extraordinary duress, like In the Name of the Father (1993), and families dealing with hardships, like In America. At times, Brothers feels like one of the films from the 1980s that dealt with families struggling to understand loved ones that had served time in the Vietnam War – In Country (1989) and Jacknife (1989) are two that come immediately to mind as spiritual antecedents to Brothers. In Sheridan’s capable hands, this film is a nicely observed character study that tries to show the trauma a soldier experience during war and what their family goes through at home, perhaps lingering a little too long on the hardships Sam endures in Afghanistan.

Brothers is a good film about an uncomfortable topic. It doesn’t offer any easy answers – how can it while we are still mired in this war? This will only come with time, but it exists as a document of where we are now. The war in the Middle East may be an unpopular one, but it is important that the stories of the people that fought it over there and continue to do so back home are told. By telling their stories maybe we can process how the war has affected us as a country.

SOURCES

Ditzian, Eric. “Brothers’ Star Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman Talk ‘Growing Up Together.’” MTV.com. December 2, 2009.

Farquharson, Vanessa. “Jim Sheridan Reflects on the Betrayals at Brothers’ Core.” The Financial Post. December 4, 2009.

Freydkin, Donna. “Natalie Portman Transitions into Adult Role in Brothers.” USA Today. December 4, 2009.

“Springsteen’s The River Brings Gyllenhaal to Tears on Set.” WENN Entertainment News Wire Service. December 3, 2009.

Thompson, Bob. “When Irish Eyes are Filming.” Vancouver Sun. December 4, 2009.

Vaughan, R.M. “You leave it to the actors, really, to the acting.” Globe & Mail. December 4, 2009.

Enemy

As a rather astute reviewer over at The Playlist observed, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) was the best thing to ever happen to Jake Gyllenhaal’s career. The much-hyped studio blockbuster was a commercial and critical failure prompting the actor to take stock of his career. He began working with directors that thought outside the box (Duncan Jones) and films that subverted their genres (End of Watch). This deliberate decision to turn his back on mainstream movies in favor of more challenging fare culminated with Enemy (2013), a psychological thriller by Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve. With a storyline that involves a man discovering he has a doppelganger, which leads to their lives intersecting in ways that threatens their very existence, Enemy invokes the Harlan Ellison short story “Shatterday,” and, in particular, its adaptation that aired on the mid-1980s anthology television show, The New Twilight Zone. While Villeneuve’s film exists very much in the thriller genre, there is a pervasive feeling of dread and unease reminiscent of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) that sees Enemy crossover into the horror genre.

An ominous vibe is established right from the get-go with shots of the Toronto skyline enshrouded in smog through a sickly yellow filter coupled with a menacing, minimalist score by Daniel Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans that puts you immediately on edge. College history professor Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is teaching a class about how dictatorships work, which he claims, among other things, involves a repeating pattern that keeps the population busy through lower education, entertainment, limited culture, and censoring information as well as any kind of self-expression. In a way, his life is that of a self-imposed dictatorship as he repeats the same routine – he teaches his class, has dinner with his girlfriend Mary (Melanie Laurent), they have sex, and she leaves. It’s a rather banal existence that includes residing in a non-descript apartment among one of many similar-looking buildings. Adam is clearly stuck in a rut and in need of a change.

A fellow teacher (Joshua Peace) strikes up a conversation one day and the man recommends a film for Adam to watch entitled, Where There’s A Will There’s A Way. He watches the movie and notices an actor that looks exactly like him! Intrigued, Adam looks the man up online and finds out that his name is Daniel Saint Claire a.k.a. Anthony Claire, a struggling actor in a troubled marriage with his pregnant wife Helen (Sarah Gadon). Soon, Adam’s obsession with Anthony affects his work and his personal life as he decides to make contact with the actor. At first, he thinks Adam is nothing more than a stalker, but is soon intrigued by this person who sounds exactly like him and arranges a face-to-face meeting. Pretty soon their respective worlds unravel as they dangerously dabble in each other’s lives.

Enemy gives Jake Gyllenhaal a chance to show his range as an actor as he starts off by portraying Adam and Anthony as two men that lead very different lives. The former is a slightly depressed professor while the latter is a confident actor. Gyllenhaal not only relies on wardrobe to differentiate the two men, but also in the way they carry themselves. Adam adopts a kind of defeated posture complete with slightly hunched shoulders while Anthony is self-assured in the way he moves around a room and interacts with his wife. This culminates in the scene where the two men first meet each other and the reaction shots Gyllenhaal gives as Adam and Anthony scope each other out is fascinating to watch. After that meeting, things change dramatically as their identities begin to blur together.

There’s a definite Lynchian vibe with technology portrayed as a menacing presence, the city as a claustrophobic hell and the use of darkness reminiscent of Lost Highway as Adam is sometimes framed in his dimly lit apartment or appears and disappears into the shadows. There is also a perverse streak that manifests itself in a subplot in which Anthony belongs to an exclusive, Eyes Wide Shut-esque sex club that we are teased with early on as a beautiful woman allows a dangerous-looking spider to crawl up her leg. This scene also introduces an unexplained recurring arachnid motif that climaxes with the startling last image of the film.

Filmmaker Denis Villeneuve read Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago’s novel The Double and it inspired him to make Enemy. He was working on another film at the time and hired a screenwriter to adapt the novel. Eventually, another writer by the name of Javier Gullon came on board and wrote a draft with the director. Villeneuve had the daunting task to find the right actor who could play two different characters that looked the same. He saw Jake Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko (2001) and felt that he would be “willing to do strange things,” and marveled at how strong he was in Brokeback Mountain (2005) – two qualities he was looking for in Enemy.

He heard that the actor was available and sent him the screenplay with a manifesto describing what he wanted it to be and how he planned to make it, which intrigued Gyllenhaal. The actor invited Villeneuve to drinks in New York City. While talking over glasses of wine, a woman approached them and claimed that her son looked exactly like the actor. Gyllenhaal thought that this encounter would make a good premise for the film. The two men discovered that they shared similar artistic sensibilities and hit it off.

Villeneuve was looking for a specific urban landscape that was “spreading forever.” He felt that most big cities in North America, like New York, had been overshot, but not Toronto, which had mostly been used to double for other metropolises. He ultimately chose to film in Toronto because it had the “kind of claustrophobic oppressive environment” he was looking for and had some of the same identity issues as the protagonist: “When we were shooting, there were moments you could feel like you were in Sao Paulo or Hong Kong of anywhere. Culturally, it’s pretty extraordinary … and I think that question of identity, in an interesting way, is at the heart of Toronto itself,” commented Gyllenhaal. The distinctive yellowish color scheme came out of a “feeling of sickness, a feeling of nausea, a feeling of discomfort, feeling of paranoia, fear” that Villeneuve got from reading the novel. They were originally going to add CGI smog to the outdoor scenes, but there was so much actual pollution the summer they shot in Toronto they didn’t have to add anything!

Filming had a very loose vibe to it with some takes lasting 20 minutes. In order to create the “artificial world” of the film, Villeneuve needed enough time to work with the actors and allow them to improvise “in order to create sparks of life in front of the camera,” he said in an interview. In the scenes where Gyllenhaal plays opposite himself, computerized motion control technology was used so that any camera moves could be duplicated exactly. The actor would perform half the scene, consult with Villeneuve about which takes were the best to use, change outfits, and shoot the other side with audio playback in a tiny earpiece.

As often happens with doppelganger stories, the other person’s identity begins to eclipse that of the protagonist. Adam begins to question his existence and becomes rightly paranoid of Anthony who starts to take a disquieting interest in the professor’s life. Adam is a slightly sympathetic man that lives in fear of Anthony who is an amoral opportunist. The director does an excellent job of gradually building tension as Adam and Anthony meddle in each other’s lives and there’s an almost tangible feeling of impending doom as the film progresses. What is also interesting is how the existence of these identical-looking and sounding men affects the women in their lives in disturbing ways. Both Melanie Laurent and Sarah Gadon do a nice job of showing how their respective characters gradually sense something amiss about their significant others.

Enemy examines the notion of identity and what happens when what makes you unique is no longer the case. How do you deal with the knowledge that there is someone out there that looks and sounds exactly like you? How does that affect the way you live your life? Villeneuve’s film wrestles with these questions and offers no easy answers, leaving it up to the viewer to figure things out. As he said in an interview, Enemy is “designed to be a puzzle … to be an enigma … You’re supposed to be disoriented. The way we tried to do it, it’s supposed to be an exciting disorientation, not a frustrating one.” Or, as his leading man put it, “To me now, when people go What the fuck? I love that response. And this is a movie like that.”

SOURCES

Braun, Liz. “Jake Gyllenhaal and Denis Villeneuve Enjoying Close Creative Partnership.” Toronto Sun. January 9, 2014.

Braun, Liz. “Denis Villeneuve, Jake Gyllenhaal Team Up Again for Enemy.” Toronto Sun. March 7, 2014.

D’Addario, Daniel. “Jake Gyllenhaal: Movies are like Dreams.” Salon.com. March 10, 2014.

Emmanuele, Julia. “Director Denis Villeneuve Says It’s Normal to Be Confused by Enemy.” Hollywood.com. March 17, 2014.

Jagernauth, Kevin. “Denis Villeneuve Talks Shooting Toronto for Enemy, Dipping into the Subconscious and His Next Projects.” The Playlist. March 20, 2014.

Lawson, David Gregory. “Interview: Denis Villeneuve.” Film Comment. February 26, 2014.

Miller, Julie. “Jake Gyllenhaal Plans to Do Something Crazier Than Be Tasered or Lose 20 Pounds for a Film.” Vanity Fair. March 5, 2014.

Olsen, Mark. “Jake Gyllenhaal Doubles Down in Enemy.” Los Angeles Times. March 15, 2014.

Suskind, Alex. “Jake Gyllenhaal Talks the Duality of Enemy and Why He Wants You to Be Confused.” The Playlist. March 11, 2014