Dead Ringers
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Movie Reviews of Dead Ringers
Movie Review: Great Minds Think Alike
Summary: 5 Stars
After creating the viscerally charged and bewildering Videodrome, Cronenberg took on a few projects with a bit more mainstream appeal: The Dead Zone, The Fly, and this film: Dead Ringers.
It's not just a clever title (in fact, the movie was going to be called "Twins" until one of Cronenberg's old producers, Ivan Reitman, asked if he could use the title for a movie he was working on with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito). The movie stars -- and stars again -- Jeremy Irons as twin gynecologists, Beverly and Elliot Mantle. Although they are physically identical, their personalities take divergent paths as they grow older. Elliot grows into a confident womanizer, a sponge for the spotlight. Beverly withdraws into books, confident in little else other than his research.
They have a good thing going. Elliot woos the women and whisks them off of their feet, and when he tires of them, he hands them off to his bro Bev. The ladies are, apparantly, none the wiser. None, that is, until they try the stunt on Claire Niveau. Claire is a melodramatic and needy type, who has a steady addiction to pills, but she's also a pretty popular actress -- a student of human actions -- and the difference between the two men's faces are easier to hide from her than the differences between their hearts. It doesn't help matters, of course, that Beverly falls in love with her.
Like many Cronenberg films, a wealth of subtext buoys the plot along, but in this case it's just as easy to enjoy the film even if you don't necessarily "get" it. The surface ripples show two men who struggle against the divisiveness of fear and longing, how they clutch at sanity and each other as if they were the same thing. Addictions to love, to drugs, to success, and to power send them spinning around each other in mutual orbits of decay. Each tries to save the other, but it's like bootstrapping in quicksand. Neither has the ground to stand on.
Those who look close enough will see elements of Cronenberg's typically fetishistic influences: bizarre tools, the polar strategies of lunacy vs. logic, weird biologies (Claire has a mutation that becomes a fixation for one of the brothers). There's more at stake than just school boy crushes becoming grown man crazies. There's also the unity of brotherly love, salvation in sinning, and something that Beverly creepily refers to as "inner beauty."
Most of the subtleties of the film are found in Jeremy Irons, who plays both brothers with a skill that can only be described as phenomenal. With the help of cutting edge special effects techniques (this before the days of CGI and digital enhancement), Irons' brothers are an amazingly convincing pair. His performances shatter into dizzying, multi-facted brilliance as the plot progresses, until it is sometimes hard to tell which brother is which. The stunning sureness of his approach to the two characters is, by itself, enough to make this movie worth watching and owning.
It is also recommended, of course, by Cronenberg's directorial talent for deifying degradation. His sharp-eyed lens is layered with images of blood-shot confusion and the clutter of offices and brains, but without a doubt it spells out something engaging, it pieces together the details of something altogether absorbing. Leave it up to Cronenberg (with the two-fold talent of Irons at his disposal) to mastermind a movie that gives a radiant, uplifting glory to a film that -- like almost all of Cronenberg's -- slowly spirals down the gutter of despair.
Movie Review: Not so identical disorders of madness...
Summary: 5 Stars
I have a touch and go relationship with David Cronenberg. I know that I'm told by many of my cinephile friends that I should embrace him, but I find it difficult. I've really liked one of his films and I've appreciated a handful of others, but as a rule I find his films to be underwhelming.
All shock and no real substance.
For many, `Dead Ringers' was a turning point for Cronenberg and the way he was viewed by the entertainment community. Here is a man who dwelled heavily in the world of shock value and horror and he was now directing a film that had almost no gore whatsoever. The film itself maintains Cronenberg's lust for horror and yet it feels so much more refined and thought out than his previous works. It has a depth that feels truly grounded, and the films horrifying elements (there are moments in this film that are cringe inducing in their disturbia) feel conceived in honesty; no matter how farfetched that may seem.
The film is actually inspired on actual events (how much of this twisted tale is truth and how much is embellishment I wonder), chronically the rather bizarre behavior of a pair of identical twin gynecologists who traded identities, lovers and, well...everything during their career. Beverly is the more prudish yet obviously more impressionable brother, and Elliot is the more suave, morally despicable one. When they both wind up inside the same actress, things get heavy and soon Beverly is slipping off the deep end, allowing his newfound obsession to control his every waking thought. Elliot, dissolving under his own breed of selfishness, snaps at the fibers of his brothers sanity by pushing him too far in areas he doesn't quite realize are `dangerous', attempting to help him in ways he knows will leave him most satisfied.
It doesn't work.
Nothing works.
The incestual underlinings of the films core can leave a bitter taste, but for me the taste was less bitter and more though provoking, for it took the idea of the kindred relationship between twins to a level I hadn't seen explored in cinema before.
As much as I seem to love this film (it is possibly the best thing that Cronenberg has ever done), my love for the film is eclipsed by my respect and admiration for everything Jeremy Irons pulled out of himself for this film. He really goes there, fully fleshing out two completely different yet similarly lost souls, giving them enough shades of difference to highlight their individual declines. It is a stunning work of art, one that grows stronger and stronger with each passing frame.
In the end I highly recommend this film. It is disturbing yet intoxicatingly so, showing a mature side of Cronenberg; a side I haven't often seen. This is what his films should all be like; stylistically unique yet poignantly respectable (and don't even try and tell me that that is what he did with that overrated `A History of Violence'.)
Movie Review: Survival by death
Summary: 5 Stars
Cronenberg is the most surprising and shocking film director I know but he always deals with situations that are out of the ordinary and he pushes them to their extreme end or even beyond. In this film he explores the relation between two real twins who have perfectly identical routes in life to the point of becoming schizophrenic and wanting to get rid of the second half of their individual personality, which is the personality of the other. They become obsessed with separating the Siamese twins they are in a way and yet are not. This derangement develops all by itself and they discover that they cannot survive separately and as soon as one does something that the other does not do both of them are disturbed to the point of having to become morbid, death-obsessed, death-seeking, death-hungry and death-thirsty. Death becomes what they physiologically need, each one of them, and both of them, to survive by compensating the difference that has appeared in their relation. All that sounds crazy and is in fact just extremely natural, natural to the extreme. The death instinct, the other side of the libido, takes over when the slightest difference appears between them and is interpreted, unconsciously, subconsciously and even consciously, as a treason of their libido, or libidos, of their libidinous survival instinct. Their survival instinct calls their death instinct up to regulate the disruption and what has to happen happens: one kills the agreeing other and that one let himself die on the body of the one he has killed, the one who has died first. The supreme irony of that film is that these two identical twins are gynecologists by profession and they are giving birth to babies day after day, till they finally and mutually abort their own lives. Amazing. And what's worst in this picture is that it is realistically possible. Cronenberg here reveals the deep fear we feel in front of identical twins, a real vertigo, in Hitchcock's meaning of the word.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Movie Review: Cronenberg's Best Film
Summary: 5 Stars
These days David Cronenberg is actually respected in the film community. He wasn't always, and it was with Dead Ringers that he escaped B horror movie schlockdom! Everything about Dead Ringers is brilliant. The direction, the original score, and the acting all come together beautifully, especially the peerless performance of Jeremy Irons playing twin brother gynecologists. Each twin brother has a distinct personality, yet Irons makes their differences very subtle! He never hits you over the head with the acting. He even purposefully blurs the lines between the two brothers to deliberately throw you off. You don't always know which brother is occupying the screen.
The score by Howard Shore is sumptuous, especially during the endgame of the film. Also, the romantic main theme that plays during the open credits provides the perfect pitch for the action that follows.
Cronenberg's directorial touch is perfect! Everything unfolds as it should. No camera pyrotechnics get in the way of the story. Most current directors need to observe the way Cronenberg lets the staged events play out naturally.
The supporting cast led by a game Genevieve Bujold and featuring a bevy of unknown actresses playing patients of the Mantle brothers all deliver solid performances. Bujold, playing an actress seeking to have a baby is not too showy. She's a good sexy foil for Irons' twins. I especially liked Stephen Lack (formerly the lead in an older Cronenberg film "Scanners") playing a sculptor in the latter portion of the film.
Quite simply, this was the best film that came out in 1988! Jeremy Irons should have won every award under the sun!
This DVD edition features a nifty and informative commentary track by Jeremy Irons.
Movie Review: Cronenberg's best film along with Crash...
Summary: 5 Stars
David Cronenberg is a remarkable filmmaker. He started out directing shclock, B-movie material, but those were infused with his own sensibility, which really came out in his later work. Dead Ringers is one of his best films, and a truly disturbing, powerful film about identity and siblings. Jeremy Irons's performance is probably the best of his career, even greater than his turn in Reversal of Fortune. He plays both twins equally well, making each twin distinctive in their own right. There is a very interesting story behind the casting of Irons. Cronenberg said in the commentary track on the Criterion DVD that he sent this script to all the A-list talent at the time, and they all turned him down. But all of the A-list talent were American actors who were "uncomfortable" playing a gynecologist. When Jeremy Irons received the script, he immediately said yes. It shows you the vast differences between the American attitude towards sex, and the British (who are known to be prudes, but are far more intelligent than Americans in sexual matters). Cronenberg's direction is masterful, building incredible tension throughout the film, and his mise en scene and colour schemes are some of the best in his career. The "instruments for operating on mutan women" segment is one of Cronenberg's most horrifying creations (these instruments were actually displayed in many art galleries after the film was made). This film was made before the advent of CGI, so all the twin sequences were done on film. They are seamless. This film, like many other Cronenberg works, haunts you long after the theater, and is still talked about day, and with good reason...