"Dead Ringers" (1988)

                               Dead Ringers, though not a particularly good film, is vintage Cronenberg, if a bit more restrained than his usual fare. David Cronenberg is cinema's native explorer of people's 'literal' insides; a pioneer of "body horror", a sub genre where the most frightening thing about life is not external, but internal.....organs, that is. He is, like the twins in Dead Ringers, both a serious filmmaker and strictly a man of genre, though more transgressive than most.
                        It is (somewhat) based on the true story of identical twin brothers Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played by Jeremy Irons), two respected gynecologists with distinct yet not so dissimilar personalities: Elliot is the confident womanizer and Beverly is the sensitive recluse, striking a balance.....until a woman comes along, an actress (played by Genevieve Bujold) who Beverly begins to grow feelings for. This leads to tension and lack of balance between the brothers, with Beverly slowly losing his mind.
                        I found the film to be rather dull and pretentious. The story has the simplistic veneer of a "supermarket tabloid" (I'm stealing the term from Ebert's 1988 review; sorry, Ebert) and wears its obvious telegraphed symbolism on its sleeve. I think my problem with the movie is that it has the potential to be audacious in a campily scintillating way but it takes itself way too seriously (it's pretty humorless). The movie is too droll and cold to have any sort of dramatic effectiveness.
                       There are things to like about it. I like Jeremy Irons' dual performance, who manages to play both characters with subtle differences that, at times, it's hard to tell them apart (which I guess is the point). I like the set designs of the office and the twins' apartment; they're cold and sterile in a late-80's yuppie stockbroker way. And the doubling effect is seamless, to the point where the movie turns into a game of "guess where the matte line is." The dream sequence where Bujold kisses Eliott and Beverly's alien-like appendage is the kind of Cronenberg I wanted more of. The scene where Beverly attempts to use his medieval instruments during surgery made me chuckle. I loved the way the surgeons are dressed in red, like a druidic Spanish Inquisition.
                        If this review seemed like a drab laundry list of random things I enjoyed, it's because the movie is slowly fading from my memory (and I've seen this movie twice!) and I'm trying to grasp at what stood out. I didn't really get anything out of it, other than "the twins are one person, and identity crisis, and sexual hang-ups" and blah blah blah.