Subject: REVIEW: MULTIPLICITY

From: [email-masked] (Scott Renshaw)
Date: 14 Jul 1996 15:24:24 GMT

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