MULTIPLICITY
A film review by Scott Renshaw
Copyright 1996 Scott Renshaw
Starring: Michael Keaton, Andie MacDowell, Richard Masur, John DeLancie, Eugene Levy, Harris Yulin. Screenplay: Chris Miller, Mary Hale, Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel, Harold Ramis. Director: Harold Ramis. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
There have been many instances where my positive reaction to a film has been as much a result of what it _wasn't_ as what it was, and GROUNDHOG DAY may be the perfect example. On paper, it was a high-concept premise with nowhere to go, an over-extended "Twilight Zone" episode with a laugh-track. There didn't appear to be any way to make an infinitely repeated day anything but infinitely repetitious, but director/co-writer Harold Ramis and co-writer Danny Rubin startled me with a comedy of improbable inventiveness and even more improbable resonance. MULTIPLICITY, Ramis' latest project, arrives with many of the same warning signs, and again it stays fresher through its running time than you might expect. This time, however, the comedy is as instantly disposable as it is enjoyable.
MULTIPLICITY stars Michael Keaton as Doug Kinney, a construction foreman living the 1990s version of the American Dream: a beautiful wife, Laura, (Andie MacDowell); two wonderful children; a never-quite-completed dream house...and almost no time to enjoy any of them. Changes at work are threatening to make Doug's life even more hectic, but he is offered a unique solution to his time crunch by geneticist Dr. Owen Leeds (Harris Yulin) -- the opportunity to be cloned, to have a second self help shoulder the burden of his responsibilities. The procedure is a success, and Doug #1 finds himself able to enjoy life more as #2 takes over his job responsibilities. But even two Doug Kinneys doesn't seem to be enough, and when Doug #3 enters the picture, the opportunities for disaster multiply right along with him.
In a way that GROUNDHOG DAY never was, MULTIPLICITY really is a gimmick film. It was easy to summarize GROUNDHOG DAY's plot in a short sentence, but it was always about the change in Bill Murray's Phil Connor. MULTIPLICITY is always about the farce of several Doug Kinneys getting each other into trouble, and the fact that it works so well and so often shows how artfully Ramis is able to execute that farce. Michael Keaton has tremendous fun with the Doug his three clones, each of whom has a rather specialized personality for his designed purpose -- #2, the workaholic, is a hard-nosed man's man, while #3, the housekeeper, is sort of a cross between John Bradshaw and the Anal-Retentive Chef. The comedy gets rather broad with Doug #4, the "copy of a copy" who turns out to be "special, but the situations are great showcases for those characters, and Keaton does some good work considering he is often working with no one but himself. Particularly memorable: a night when Doug #1 is away and the three clones get a chance to play...with a sexually insatiable Laura.
MULTIPLICITY is a very funny film, full of clever touches like the character of a blissfully incompetent sub-contractor played by Eugene Levy and a housing development called "Vista del Nada" (View of Nothing), and it's easy to keep smiling through most of its 110 minutes. Unfortunately, its attempts at a message get rather muddled. Contributing screenwriters Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel (CITY SLICKERS, FORGET PARIS) have a tendency to paint emotional situations in extremely broad strokes, and that leads to some rather forced conflicts between Doug and Laura. Andie MacDowell, who was so good in GROUNDHOG DAY, doesn't have the chance to make an impression here; her character is a necessity, not an individual. As the film wraps up, Doug is forced to save his marriage by facing hard truths about himself, but exactly what those truths are and how they relate to the cloning escapades which have come before are never quite clear.
There are a number of rough edges in MULTIPLICITY (including the excessively grainy special effects photography by Richard Edlund which allow the four Dougs to interact), and they are mostly the result of an attempt to be the kind of film GROUNDHOG DAY was: a laugh-out-loud comedy which also managed to be about something warm and human. That kind of film is a rarity indeed, and it is no sin to have aspirations to that kind of completeness. MULTIPLICITY, however, is simply a laugh-out-loud comedy about clones running around, and the mayhem which ensues. Ramis set himself a high bar with GROUNDHOG DAY, but you don't need to set a world record every time out to be a winner. In MULTIPLICITY, one laugh usually turns into another.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 clone feats: 7.
-- Scott Renshaw Stanford University http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~srenshaw
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