Dead Ringers [VHS]

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Dead Ringers [VHS] Review

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.

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