Duplex

MOVIE DETAILS

Rating: 5.9 out of 10
Director: Danny DeVito
Writer: Larry Doyle
Star: Ben Stiller, Drew Barrymore, Eileen Essell
Genres: Comedy
Release Date: September 26, 2003 (United States)

Duplex

While the whole world was shocked by the butter scene of “Last Tango in Paris,” featuring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, Art Buchwald explained about the movie. It’s not about sex at all, said he, but rather what people would do for a rent-controlled apartment in Paris. In “Duplex,” a yuppie couple finds their life transformed to the point where they’re considering murder.

Drew Barrymore and Ben Stiller are Nancy and Alex, young professionals fleeing from a Manhattan flat that is “the size of a small child.” They purchase a perfect apartment in Brooklyn, with three fireplaces and original stained-glass windows on a quiet street; there are even shelves for his collection of first editions. Here he will be able to finish his second novel while she commutes to her job as a magazine editor. The apartment is even duplexed but there’s a catch: Upstairs lives sweet little old rent-controlled lady who pays only $88 per month.

“She hasn’t been feeling too well lately,” says their real-estate agent (Harvey Fierstein) with hope. So that’s perfect. They’ll move in, the sweet little old lady will die, and then they can take over upstairs and start their family. The problem is that the sweet little old lady is annoying not just annoying but obnoxious on an alarming scale.

Her name is Mrs. Connell (played by Eileen Essel), she’s 81 years old but bounces around like a cheerleader. Maybe doubles were used for some of the movement, but Essel has boundless energy; she’s aggressively cheerful despite their raids upon her sanity; she keeps them guessing mentioning at one point that her husband died in 1963 after they’d been married 58 years; Barrymore almost crosses her eyes trying to do the math.

Essel’s energy and timing are delightful; Stiller and Barrymore are fun, too few actors do a better slow burn than Stiller, who eventually realizes that he will never finish his novel or have a life as long as Mrs. Connell lives upstairs. But the movie is an extension of one joke: Mrs. Connell, in her passive-aggressive and sometimes not so passive way, makes life hell for them; they take it as long as they can; then they snap.

Mrs. Connell, for instance, plays her TV at top volume all night long. She wants Alex to run errands for her all day. He helps her go shopping and she counts everything out blueberries, pennies. One day when he’s working against deadline on his novel she invites some friends over to visit little old ladies like herself, who turn out to be members of a brass ensemble.

Eventually it becomes possible to think about killing her; at one point Alex is cruising the subway system hoping to catch lethal flu bug so he can sneeze on some popcorn and send it upstairs with Nancy. But murder plots aimed at Mrs. Connell don’t produce quite the laughter they should, perhaps because no matter what she does she still seems sweetly old ladylike indeed irredeemably so.

The movie is directed by Danny DeVito who utilizes some of the same black humor he had in his great “The War of the Roses” (1989). But that was about equals (Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner) whose loathing becomes homicidal, and it had a psychological depth to justify their extremes. “Duplex” is all plot; it tries to impose feelings we don’t really have.

We can’t identify with Mrs. Connell, certainly not; but we can’t with Alex and Nancy either because their frustration is not ours and the reason for this is that we do not believe it. There’s too much contriving without enough plausibility, so ultimately we’re just enjoying the performances and wishing they’d been in a more believable movie.

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