Enemy | createdbyrcw

This may sound like an unimportant statement, but as a newly minted screenwriter, I was starting to worry that I seemed to dislike every movie I watched in theatres or via Netflix.

Now, I must admit that I have spent much of my life as a hypercritical asshole, a picker of nits most egregious, so it perhaps came as no surprise that a movie had to be pretty solid to impress me…but when you go through dozens of movies and find all of them meh, you start to worry. Or at least, I did.

You see, I slowly began to doubt my own understanding of what makes for a good film, or more importantly to me, a good story. And as someone who has decided to be a professional storyteller that is a worrisome doubt to have.

Movies that I have found lacking despite their acclaim

The recent fare that I had heard wonderful reviews of or that had won awards:

Blue Jasmine – good performance by Cate Blanchett in a completely forgettable movie
The East – incredibly slow melodrama in which none of the characters was note-worthy and a moral dilemma on which the screenwriter and director refuse to take a position
Life of Pi – hated the book, bored by the movie…would have been more likeable as a Disney flick
Vicky Cristina Barcelona – boring people with no ties to the real world (like a need for money) screwing
Noah – missed opportunity to explore the more interesting character of Tubal-Cain
Dom Hemingway – a wonderful portrait of the eponymous character, a terribly flawed story (my thoughts)
Enemy – 2014 Cdn Screen Award as Best Picture, thief of 90 minutes of my life (my thoughts)

I have many colleagues who will defend some or all of these movies to the hilt and yet I found each of them somewhere between seriously flawed and downright insulting.

Clearly, I was the problem. In my zeal to craft my own stories, I had become myopic on what a good story is, what good characters are.

And then I watched The Boy In The Striped Pajamas.

Wow. I was blown away, not just by the subject matter, but by the story itself, the unique perspective and the richly drawn characters.

Sure, there were one or two small moments where I tilted my head askew, but they did not linger. Nor did they snowball in my consciousness as they were few and far between.

Movies that have renewed my faith in storytelling

Last night, I watched The Reader.

Not as blown away, but still enthralled. Rich characters, slow revelations, palpable conflict both within and without.

I don’t hate movies.

I have no time for movies that fail…and more importantly, I aspire to and am inspired by movies that succeed.

Doubts remain, but thankfully, they have diminished.

So, it was $5-Tuesday yesterday at the Carlton Cinema in Toronto and a friend invited me to see a movie called Enemy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Like any weary movie-goer, I immediately jumped online to look at the trailer and thought, “Hmmm, weird, but interesting”.

I was half right. The movie was weird.

At this point, I should probably say “SPOILER ALERT”, but truth be told, I am not sure that if I laid out every event that occurred in this movie, you would know what was happening. I sat through it and I don’t know what happened.

As the trailer indicates, the movie is about a man who is dissatisfied with his life—never explains why, he just is—and is merely going through the motions of living until one day when he realizes that his exact doppelganger lives in town.

Terrified at this revelation—never explains why, he just is—he is nonetheless drawn to his twin and after jumping through a series of over-complicated hoops, he meets the twin. At which point, he second-guesses his decision and it is his twin’s turn to go neurotic—never explains why, he just does.

As you may have guessed from my above repetition of “never explains why”, my greatest issue with this movie is unclear character motivation. Perhaps it says more about me and my life history, but I have no idea why any of these characters acts as extremely as they do.

I am confident that it is part of the artistic conceit of the piece that at numerous moment are you fully sure which Jake Gyllenhaal character you are watching onscreen. The challenge with this is that the emotional rollercoaster of each of the characters is such that from cut-to-cut within the same scene, I am never sure which Jake Gyllenhaal character I am watching. I ended up watching the characters’ clothing rather than the actor’s face to try to follow the story.

And the motivations of the secondary characters are just as muddy for me, although at least here, we have different actors and so don’t have the Gyllenhaal rabbit hole with which to contend. Like a faucet tap, the emotions of these characters change with a flick—questioning in one moment, horny in the next, and angry in the third, and all in the span of 30-45 seconds.

A definite statement of who I am, I spent much of the movie trying to predict the reveal of the story based on the clues or purely on conjecture.

Twins separated at birth? Time travel with a glitch? Parallel universes collide? Psychotic episode of one man leading two lives?

No SPOILER ALERT to say none of these came to fruition, but that still doesn’t mean that any of them may not be true. Hell, all of them might be true. I don’t know.

And any hope of a conclusion is muddied by a massive metaphor that scurries through this movie—I won’t tell you what it is—and yet offers no satisfying explanation.

Enemy is described everywhere as a thriller. I’d be more inclined to call it a puzzler…and even that may be too lofty. Head-scratcher and headache-giver might be more accurate.

As I read up on the movie to write this, I learned the film won Canadian Screen Awards (our Oscar) for Best Director and Best Supporting Actress, and was nominated for Best Film. I find that disturbing.

The film was based on the 2002 novel The Double (O Homem Duplicado), by Portuguese author José Saramango. Part of me wants to find the novel to see if it is any clearer than the movie, but as of this moment, a bigger part of me just wants to walk away from this entire episode in my life.

Previous posts about characters in writing and film:

Just Tell The Story – Austin Film Festival

The Dignity of Characters

A Matter of Character

Can You Relate?

I Am Always Right (Motivation)

Dara Marks at Toronto Screenwriting Conference 2013

Unpacking Baggage (Part One)

Unpacking Baggage (Part Two)