DOUBLE FEATURES 07.03.20

BY: Daniel Fisher

Mark Ruffalo, the latest actor to take on the daunting task of playing twins, delivers two powerful performances as identical brothers in the six-part series I Know This Much Is True, currently streaming on HBO. While the show is intense and unsettling, Ruffalo’s sensitive and nuanced portrayals make seeing it through to the end highly rewarding and elevate him into a rarified circle of actors who have successfully managed to breathe life into two similar-yet-different characters. They include Bette Davis, who did it twice in 1946’s A Stolen Life and 1964’s Dead Ringer, Eddie Murphy to brilliant comic effect in the oft-overlooked Bowfinger and perhaps most famously, Jeremy Irons, in the benchmark of twins films, David Cronenberg‘s sinister 1989 masterpiece, Dead Ringers. (And, while two actors play them, special mention must go to the creepy twin girls in The Shining for causing the most psychological damage to anyone who has seen the film).

While any of these movies would make for a great twins-themed double feature, we at PROVOKR suggest pairing one of the more recent entries in the canon, Brian Helgeland’s 2015 film Legend, starring Tom Hardy as real-life twin-brothers-in-crime the Krays and Adaptation., the brain-scrambling mindfuck featuring Nicolas Cage, whose revelatory performance is among his best, right up there with Moonstruck and Raising Arizona.  

Ronald and Reggie Kray were street-smart club owners-cum-gangsters who ruled London’s underworld in the 1960s and achieved tabloid modicum celebrity in their day. While Helgeland, the screenwriter behind L.A. Confidential and A Knight’s Tale, is not the first filmmaker to bring the story of the notorious Krays to the screen, Hardy is the first actor to play both of the brothers and he relishes every moment. Be warned: it is a violent, often disturbing film, but Hardy is so charismatic, talented and deftly creates the two very different characters that the brothers were. Hardy does it to the extent that it is hard to imagine the movie succeeding as well as it does with anyone else in the roles. 

Adaptation., the second collaborative effort of writer-director duo Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze (the first being the brilliantly absurd Being John Malkovich), is a film unlike any other. Cage plays socially inept, tightly wound screenwriter Charlie (Kaufman)and his fictional twin Donald. Charlie is attempting to adapt real-life New Yorker writer Susan Orlean’s journalistic masterpiece “The Orchid Thief” for the screen. He meets with Orlean (Meryl Streep) to research the story and ends up getting in way over his head as he discovers that she is having an affair with John Laroche (Chris Cooper), the actual orchid thief and subject of her book. Enter Donnie, Charlie’s simple-minded, happy-go-lucky twin brother, who tries to help Charlie with both his script and his personal life. As far as the film veers into existential territory, it is anchored by Cage’s exceptional casting who masterfully brings so much depth and poignancy to his twins that you can’t help but care about them.  

 

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