"The Devil's Double" depicts a short, sharp and rather sad chapter which makes up part of the wider, uglier tapestry that-is the story of the nation of Iraq. It would be inaccurate to remark that the film is a triumph of genuine substance, but it would be additionally wrong to say the film, whilst coming close to resembling mere exploitation, is nothing but mere exploitation.
In its basest form, it is a depiction of pure evil; a depiction of a society whose leaders, or at least the sons of the leaders, have had moral bypasses; where no deviance is off-limits: paedophilia, nepotism, hedonism, the forcing of someone to undergo plastic surgery, the imprisoning of people against their will for the crime of daring to disagree. Try to imagine the opening act of "A Clockwork Orange" prolonged for about an hour, by which point most of the content, the likes of which might only belong in the opening thirty minutes to establish character, is still unfolding anyway.
The film is certainly high on energy. It is kinetic in a way a blockbuster might be and is very good at pulling at our emotional chords, even exploitatively so - enraging us; saddening us; disgusting us; manipulating us, but it is never dull. It possesses at its core a dynamic performance by English actor Dominic Cooper, who plays both one character and his body-double, the latter of whom, of course, must over the timespan of the film learn to 'play' the other person. Cooper is so good you forget it is the same person.
Glancing over a map of Iraq and its immediate neighbours, you can almost see where the powers-that-be once decided to draw the lines, quite literally, in the sand: the synthetic nature of the borders it shares with Kuwait and Jordan, originally conceived in the wake of World War One by Britain and France, and then of course later inherited by the United States, more broadly via the Monroe Doctrine, are quite striking. "The Devil's Double" unfolds in the Iraq of the 1980's, by which time it is in the grip of the Hussein dynasty, whose premiership, I believe, was wooed away from Soviet leanings by the West for its oil and in spite of their knowing of the sadism abound in its government. It was Dwight Eisenhower who, after all, once described the Arabian Peninsula as 'the most strategically important area in the world', due to its oil, which was the era's great 'material prize'.
From the frontline of the Iran-Iraq War, Latif Yahia (Cooper) is yanked away to the would-be tranquillity of the presidential confines of Baghdad, only to be asked to serve as the body-double of a man called Uday (Cooper again), one of Saddam's sons and heir to the dynasty. Director Lee Tamahori grants us a sense of just how different these two men are and just how much of a challenge it will be for Yahia to pull off what is asked of him when we observe the man to be slow in his movement; nervous; dirty in his fatigues - a humble electronics store worker who puts in the hours and stands in sharp contrast to the loud, exuberant Uday, whose wealth is essentially inherited and who could not be any further from Yahia in terms of attitudes towards women and material possessions.
The well-being of his family on the line, Yahia has no choice, and there is always a sense of something at stake. He schooled with Uday when he was younger and Saddam's son always thought the two looked similar - with a few changes, they could be identical. The fact Uday might even need a body-double in the first place, someone to head out to the frontline with pomp and ceremony and give speeches to troops while Uday rests easy at home, safe from potential assassination attempts and enemy shelling should Iranian intelligence extend that far, is essentially an unspoken admittance to the nature of the despotic regime.
The film seems to want to impart the idea that Iraq is, and always was, a place full of dedicated and resourceful people who, if only they could break free of Hussein's shackles, might thrive no end. Perhaps that was the case in 1991, but is it still the reality in a post-9/11 system? Similarly, it does not seem to have time for the man born into privilege, the man who did not work for anything he has.
Tamahori neglects going into the substance behind what Iraq is and where it came from; it is very good at inducing emotional cues, but less so at painting the nature of the West's relationship with Iraq beyond anything that is black and white: clips of Bush Senior during Desert Storm are designed to stir patriotic sentiment, but absent are the points on how Hussein did far worse prior to 1990 and with Washington's blessings.
Absent too are points on how Hussein even tried to negotiate Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank with his own from Ramallah's oilfields; the fact Kuwait had harmed Iraq's economy post Iran-war by violating an OPEC quota agreement; the hypocrisy as to how America had just spent most of the 1980's behaving in Central America in a fashion not dissimilar to how Hussein behaved anyway and how if, as Bush said, 'the first principles are that the Persian Gulf is crucial to the United States and that the US therefore must defend its interests with military force', then could not Hussein quite easily concoct the same sorts of arguments?
Instead, the focus is on something else; not 'entertainment' as such, but certainly something else. The film will likely move you, but not in the same way that the great pieces of cinema in the past might have done. Instead, the focus is on evil; what happens when a man's moral centre collapses out of their personality and what happens when an ordinary person is dumped into extraordinary circumstances.
In its basest form, it is a depiction of pure evil; a depiction of a society whose leaders, or at least the sons of the leaders, have had moral bypasses; where no deviance is off-limits: paedophilia, nepotism, hedonism, the forcing of someone to undergo plastic surgery, the imprisoning of people against their will for the crime of daring to disagree. Try to imagine the opening act of "A Clockwork Orange" prolonged for about an hour, by which point most of the content, the likes of which might only belong in the opening thirty minutes to establish character, is still unfolding anyway.
The film is certainly high on energy. It is kinetic in a way a blockbuster might be and is very good at pulling at our emotional chords, even exploitatively so - enraging us; saddening us; disgusting us; manipulating us, but it is never dull. It possesses at its core a dynamic performance by English actor Dominic Cooper, who plays both one character and his body-double, the latter of whom, of course, must over the timespan of the film learn to 'play' the other person. Cooper is so good you forget it is the same person.
Glancing over a map of Iraq and its immediate neighbours, you can almost see where the powers-that-be once decided to draw the lines, quite literally, in the sand: the synthetic nature of the borders it shares with Kuwait and Jordan, originally conceived in the wake of World War One by Britain and France, and then of course later inherited by the United States, more broadly via the Monroe Doctrine, are quite striking. "The Devil's Double" unfolds in the Iraq of the 1980's, by which time it is in the grip of the Hussein dynasty, whose premiership, I believe, was wooed away from Soviet leanings by the West for its oil and in spite of their knowing of the sadism abound in its government. It was Dwight Eisenhower who, after all, once described the Arabian Peninsula as 'the most strategically important area in the world', due to its oil, which was the era's great 'material prize'.
From the frontline of the Iran-Iraq War, Latif Yahia (Cooper) is yanked away to the would-be tranquillity of the presidential confines of Baghdad, only to be asked to serve as the body-double of a man called Uday (Cooper again), one of Saddam's sons and heir to the dynasty. Director Lee Tamahori grants us a sense of just how different these two men are and just how much of a challenge it will be for Yahia to pull off what is asked of him when we observe the man to be slow in his movement; nervous; dirty in his fatigues - a humble electronics store worker who puts in the hours and stands in sharp contrast to the loud, exuberant Uday, whose wealth is essentially inherited and who could not be any further from Yahia in terms of attitudes towards women and material possessions.
The well-being of his family on the line, Yahia has no choice, and there is always a sense of something at stake. He schooled with Uday when he was younger and Saddam's son always thought the two looked similar - with a few changes, they could be identical. The fact Uday might even need a body-double in the first place, someone to head out to the frontline with pomp and ceremony and give speeches to troops while Uday rests easy at home, safe from potential assassination attempts and enemy shelling should Iranian intelligence extend that far, is essentially an unspoken admittance to the nature of the despotic regime.
The film seems to want to impart the idea that Iraq is, and always was, a place full of dedicated and resourceful people who, if only they could break free of Hussein's shackles, might thrive no end. Perhaps that was the case in 1991, but is it still the reality in a post-9/11 system? Similarly, it does not seem to have time for the man born into privilege, the man who did not work for anything he has.
Tamahori neglects going into the substance behind what Iraq is and where it came from; it is very good at inducing emotional cues, but less so at painting the nature of the West's relationship with Iraq beyond anything that is black and white: clips of Bush Senior during Desert Storm are designed to stir patriotic sentiment, but absent are the points on how Hussein did far worse prior to 1990 and with Washington's blessings.
Absent too are points on how Hussein even tried to negotiate Israel's withdrawal from the West Bank with his own from Ramallah's oilfields; the fact Kuwait had harmed Iraq's economy post Iran-war by violating an OPEC quota agreement; the hypocrisy as to how America had just spent most of the 1980's behaving in Central America in a fashion not dissimilar to how Hussein behaved anyway and how if, as Bush said, 'the first principles are that the Persian Gulf is crucial to the United States and that the US therefore must defend its interests with military force', then could not Hussein quite easily concoct the same sorts of arguments?
Instead, the focus is on something else; not 'entertainment' as such, but certainly something else. The film will likely move you, but not in the same way that the great pieces of cinema in the past might have done. Instead, the focus is on evil; what happens when a man's moral centre collapses out of their personality and what happens when an ordinary person is dumped into extraordinary circumstances.