Someone forgot to furnish vacant 'Duplex' with comedy

Friday, September 26, 2003

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

In "Duplex," Danny DeVito's latest snarky farce passing as acid-dipped satire, cute professional couple Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore find the house of their dreams.

MOVIE REVIEW

DUPLEX

DIRECTOR: Danny DeVito

CAST: Ben Stiller, Drew Barrymore, Eileen Essel

RUNNING TIME: 97 minutes

RATING: PG-13 for sexual content, language and some violence

WHERE: Bella Bottega 11, Cinema 17, East Valley 13, Galaxy Tacoma 6, Galleria 11, Grand Cinemas, Issaquah 9, Longston Place 14, Marysville Cinema 14, Metro, Monroe 12, Mountlake 9, Pacific Place, Parkway Plaza 12, Woodinville 12

GRADE: D+

There's only one little catch: it's a duplex and their upstairs neighbor, a cooing old Irish widow (Eileen Essel), is anchored in for good by rent control laws. Thus begins a nightmarish assault on their patience and good humor, an ordeal exceeded only by that of the audience of this lead balloon of a comedy.

By turns haughty and judgmental, sweetly passive-aggressive, and indignantly accusatory (often in the same visit), this dotty dowager is a demon behind a wrinkled smile. At the very least, she's a living curse.

Since their good intentions all backfire, the nice young couple downstairs turns to dirty tricks and bad behavior, acting out their nastiest repressed fantasies with all the success of Wile E. Coyote in his campaign against the Roadrunner.

At first glance this might seem like a throwback to DeVito's directorial debut, "Throw Momma From the Train," his harried Looney Tunes take on Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train." But "Duplex" has none of the manic energy of that film and neither the high-boil exasperation nor the childlike innocence of those characters.

Stiller, who excels at playing try-too-hard guys who are too timid to say no and become tongue-tied into surrender whenever they do, loses his hapless quality under DeVito's direction. Barrymore, the cuddly, spunky romantic, is all bubble and no backbone.

Behind all the violent slapstick and explosive backfires of their cartoonishly exaggerated campaign of sabotage and booby traps is a hint of social satire -- the drive to grab the American Dream pushed to the limits of homicidal solutions.

But the film shows every sign of having been whittled down to its brittle, calcified comic bones. There's no slow descent into ruthless warfare and we get neither the giddy charge of their bad behavior, nor the guilty sting of complicity in their ruthless desire. All that's left is an idea still in search of a script.