The Double is unforgettably visual

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      Starring Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska. Rating unavailable.

      Jesse Eisenberg must have a dark side, right? It surfaced passive-aggressively in The Social Network, and he plays a possible ecoterrorist in Night Moves, also showing here this week. Hell, he could probably beat up Michael Cera if he absolutely had to.

      Eisenberg’s potential for rage is unleashed, twice, purely through body language and voice control, in The Double, loosely based on Feodor Dostoyevsky’s early novella of the same name. His Simon James is a meek clerk at a data-processing bureau straight out of Brazil, by way of Franz Kafka and David Lynch. Simon’s daily humiliations are as close as he gets to recognition from his boss (Wallace Shawn) and a comely coworker (Mia Wasikowska, of Tracks and Jane Eyre) who also lives in his prisonlike building.

      One day, an oddly familiar fellow called James Simon, sporting the same face and an identical suit, is hired and immediately becomes the company star. Neglected Simon is initially dismayed, then becomes more obsessed with defeating his arrogant doppelgänger than with claiming whatever comes so easily to this troubling newcomer.

      The unforgettably visual Double was directed by U.K.–based Richard Ayoade, a sometime actor who made the similarly stylish Submarine. He scripted this unpredictable and mordantly funny adaptation with Avi Korine, brother of Harmony. Production designer David Crank, who also worked on Lincoln, The Master, and There Will Be Blood, puts stark lighting on characters entombed by geometric shapes and heavy textures, but the gloominess is offset by thousands of industrial details, leaning towards boxy, late-Soviet technology and 1970s IBM. Another layer of irony is added by the soundtrack’s use of sugary Japanese pop music from the ’60s.

      The dual nature of the protagonist remains mysterious. Is his more confident self a projection of thwarted ambitions, or is his real-world success being methodically undermined by neurotic doubts? Is this internal fracturing a unique madness or does it indicate the emerging conditions of “modern” existence? One hundred and sixty years later, the questions are still valid, and not answered by the film’s proudly baffling finish. The third act is not quite as satisfying as the brilliant setup; but hey, that sounds like most people’s lives.

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