REVIEW: MULTIPLICITY
A film review by Michael Redman
Copyright 1996 Michael Redman
** (out of ****)
Mr. Mom has a lot on his hands nowadays and can't get to half of it. His job requires more hours than are in the day and he just got assigned even more responsibilities. His wife wants him to spend more time at home and, by the way, could he finish building their half-completed home? He misses his kids' sporting events and Brownie graduation.
Sound familiar? Lack of time must be the disease of the nineties. No one has the schedule to do it all. Few have the ability to squeeze in even the essentials, much less have any fun. When Doug Kinney (Michael Keaton) is asked what he does to relax, he replies "golf". Questioned about how often he plays, his response is "never". Welcome to the late 20th century, Doug, where all of our obligations and labor-saving devices have conspired to steadily shrink the time where we do what we really want to a scant few hours a week.
Doug can't deal and finds his magical way out one day while supervising construction at a lab. It turns out that the facility specializes in creating fully grown clones, so Doug takes home another Doug to help him out. Doug Number Two is sent to work so that the original can get his duties done at home.
But, even with two of them, there's still not enough time for golf and Doug Number Three comes into the picture. Later, Two and Three still can't get it all done so they duplicate Number Four from one of the clones. As often happens, the copy of a copy isn't quite as sharp as the original. No matter how many Dougs there are, the work load increases to more than can be done.
The film wanders around during the first hour trying to set the stage for the "message" before it finds its course. Only after the clones exist is there much humor and the yucks are still fewer than you would hope. The comedy is mostly various send-ups of the "Two dates in the same night" scene you're well acquainted with. The only hilarious scenes are with Number Four, but even then you stand the chance of feeling guilty at laughing at a "special" (Uh oh, that's not the correct _euphemism_d'_jour_, is it?) person.
Director Harold Ramis ("Ghostbusters", "Groundhog Day") has a feel for the science fiction comedy and humorous bits, but these scenes (as well as "Groundhog Day") don't hold together as a whole.
He does successfully avoid one apparent pitfall in having four exact copies of Doug. Instead of copies, which would become annoyingly redundant, they are aspects of Doug, not actual clones. Number Two is Manly Man Doug; Three, Feminine Side Doug and Four, Inner Child Doug. This gives Keaton something to work with and he does so with competence although nothing spectacular.
Andie MacDowell plays Laura, Doug's long-suffering (and never lets him forget it) wife. The actress is mostly wasted as more a plot object for the various Dougs to interact with than an actual human being. MacDowell does nothing much for the film other than look as if she is about to cry during every minute she's on screen.
Oh yeah, the message? If you want your woman to really love you, build her a house.
[This originally appeared in "The Bloomington Voice", Bloomington, Indiana, 7/26/96. Michael Redman can be reached at mredman@bvoice.com]
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