The Two Jakes.
The H-Bomb: Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a college history professor who lives a modest, quiet life in a small, sepia-stained apartment. His human interaction is limited to the lectures he robotically recites to his class, his stay-in date nights with his girlfriend, Mary (Melanie Laurent), and the occasional small talk he engages in with co-workers on his lunch breaks. It’s during one of these lunch breaks that a fellow professor recommends a movie to him, Where There’s a Will There’s a Way, which he’s told is a locally produced film.
Feeling depressed, and in need of a good cheering up, Adam rents the movie after work (yes, he actually goes to a store and rents it), watches it, and thinks nothing of it. Later that night, he awakens from a dream, a dream that compels him to give the movie another look. He skips ahead to a certain scene in a hotel lobby, and finds what he’s looking for; an actor, an extra playing a bellhop, who looks just like him. It could be a trick of the light, or the angle, so Adam searches the actor’s name, Anthony Claire, online, and finds that the guy does, indeed, look exactly like him. We’re talking doppelgänger identical here, folks.
Adam tracks this Anthony fellow down through his talent agency and obtains his home phone number. The first time he calls, he gets Anthony’s pregnant wife, Helen (Sarah Gadon). He finds out from talking to her, that not only does he look exactly like Anthony, he sounds exactly like him. Now, Adam is getting a little weirded out, but he still wants to meet this guy. So, he calls again, and this time he gets Anthony.
At first, Anthony thinks that Adam is either a crank, or a stalker, and politely tells him to piss off. But, Adam is a rather persistent fellow, and eventually Anthony agrees to meet with him at a motel. What happens when they meet at the motel, and where the film goes from there, I cannot say. What I can say is that Adam and Anthony do share a connection. A connection that involves strange dreams, dimly lit corridors, scantily clad women, and spiders… oh yes, spiders.
Enemy is a film that I’m of two minds about (pun perhaps intended). On the one hand, this psychological pseudo-thriller had me totally immersed as I was watching it. From the tantalizingly enigmatic opening scene, all the way to the downright baffling finale, I was so utterly absorbed, I literally couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen. On the other hand, by the time it was over, I was left feeling a bit empty, as if I had just sat through a 90-minute-long shaggy dog joke, the kind where the punchline is both unclear, and not really worth the wait.
Reuniting lead actor Gyllenhaal with his Prisoners director Denis Villeneuve, this intoxicating mind-fuck owes an obvious debt to David Lynch (particularly with its eerie sound design) and wears its ambiguity on its sleeve. In fact, Enemy plays like a slightly less confounding version of Lost Highway, in which much of what is seen may or may not actually be happening, and just about everything is a metaphor for something. All the clues for an accurate interpretation are there; in the visuals, in lines of dialogue, and in how the two Jakes behave in a given situation. The sparse script by Javier Gullon, adapted from a novel by Jose Saramago, provides the pieces to the puzzle, but it’s left entirely up to the audience to figure out where those pieces go.
Was I able to solve the puzzle? Yes… I think… maybe. Will I lay it all out here? Well, since this is a review and not a dissertation, no. After all, it’s not my job to interpret the movie for you, dear readers, it’s simply to tell you whether or not it’s any good. And is it? Yes, for the most part. Using shadowy cinematography and the aforementioned Lynch-like sound design to creepy effect, director Villeneuve creates a foreboding atmosphere, building a sense of dread that keeps us ill at ease and wondering just where the hell this could all be going. Villeneuve may be aping Lynch shamelessly, but at least he’s doing it well.
With his previous film, the excellent Prisoners, Villeneuve demonstrated that he could elicit some fine performances from his actors, and in that regard, Enemy is no different. Gyllenhaal is the central focus in his dual role, and he absolutely nails what I can confidently call his most accomplished performance. It goes beyond simply playing two different men with two different personalities; the nuances, the ever-so-slight differences that he gives both of these characters require a degree of subtlety, and an attention to detail, that few actors are capable of. Gyllenhaal’s performance is one of true psychological complexity, and alone makes the film worth seeing.
Now, I must reiterate, that as taken with Enemy as I was while watching it, once the ultimate resolution became apparent, it was underwhelming. Maybe it’s just me, but I found it pretty damn anti-climatic. Also, this is a rather slow paced affair that will probably limit its appeal to art house enthusiasts and those who enjoy abstract spider imagery. Finally, I must stress that the ending is a genuine head scratcher. Truly and epically bewildering. I had to immediately rewind the scene and watch it again, just to make sure I saw what I saw, correctly. It’s the kind of denouement that will make people ask the same question they’ll likely be asking themselves throughout the entire film: WTF???
