REVIEW: Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1992)

There are great movies, and there are movies that contain greatness.  Dead Ringers contains a dual performance by Jeremy Irons that's so riveting, so sympathetic, and so expertly handled by David Cronenberg that the film becomes unforgettable.  He portrays identical twins Beverly and Elliott Mantle, Canadian gynecologists who work in the same practice, dress in the same clothes and have sex with the same women.  Elliott takes them first, and he gives the leftovers to anxious Beverly; the women mistake him for Elliott, and they can hardly be blamed.

Although his two personalities are bifurcated in a basic way, with one as smug id, the other as effete superego, Irons keeps the twins low-key.  They speak in similar cadence, at similar volume, both keeping stronger emotions buried.  Rather than being hit over the head with a binary archetype, viewers continually search for hints of difference.  There are many scenes where it's difficult to remember who is who, and that's a good thing.  In fact, that's the most important thing.  We aren't meant to see these men as two people, but as two sides of a coin.  The film is about watching that coin spin and fall.

Iron's stunning performance (with aid from Cronenberg's control) explains why Dead Ringers can get a couple of key things wrong and still feel overwhelmingly successful.  For example, the film introduces actress Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold) as a feminine wedge between the two men.  No joke - the men fall in love with her cervix.  Bujold plays her role as constantly exhausted, which makes sense - actresses in the movie business have a limited lifespan, and every gig matters.  However, her increasing absence in the main story suggest that her character's less of a person and more of a plot motivator.  They eventually push her out, like a graft that doesn't match the host.

Another example.  There's a scene later in the film when a drug-addled Beverly seeks out a metallurgist to make him some new gynecological tools - they look like something H. R. Giger might use to chop salad.  The implements point back to earlier Cronenberg "body-horror" images, like the gun-hand of Videodrome and organic breakdown of The Fly, but those images felt more essential to their respective films.  These tools offer an hint of the lurking grotesquerie inside Beverly, but they're the only image of their particular style in the film, and they don't contribute anything beyond their essential weirdness.  Which makes them feel like a needless addition, a stylistic red herring.

Mostly, that detour frustrates because it diverts the story from its true focus: the mutually-assured destruction of Beverly and Elliott, who are as inseparable as Chang and Eng.  Whenever Cronenberg focuses on them, either with careful editing or elegant in-camera , the film mesmerizes.  The film doesn't have the more gratifying thrills of a film like Black Swan, which uses its twinning premise to create an emotional flurry of shame and desperation and violence.  This film trudges to a marked grave.  There's a moment in the film when the degenerating Beverly forces Elliott to choose whether to leave his brother behind or descend to his level in the hopes of pulling him out.  This being a horror film by David Cronenberg, there's no surprise as to what Elliott will choose, but God help me, there's so much dread.

RATING: A-