by Frank Calvillo
Box Office Alternative Column
Box Office Alternative is a weekly look into additional/optional choices to the big-budget spectacle opening up at your local movie theater every Friday. Oftentimes, titles will consist of little-known or underappreciated work from the same actor/writer/director/producer of said new release, while at other times, the selection for the week just happens to touch upon the same subject in a unique way. Above all, this is a place to revisit and/or discover forgotten cinematic gems of all kinds.
This Friday sees two of Hollywood’s A-listers, Drew Barrymore and Ben Stiller, releasing movies they’ve helped shape and hone from their early beginnings. Barrymore is executive producing the romantic comedy How to Be Single, and Stiller is producing, directing, and starring in the anticipated sequel Zoolander 2.
Both films should connect with their respective audiences enough to turn a profit, once again reaffirming their statuses as power players on both sides of the camera. With the release of the two films this week, I couldn’t help but recall their starring/producing turns in director Danny DeVito’s dark comedy Duplex.
In Duplex, Stiller and Barrymore play Alex and Nancy Rose, a successful New York couple on the hunt for a new place to call home. When their realtor (Harvey Fierstein) shows them a classic brownstone that’s surprisingly in their price range, Alex and Nancy believe they have found their dream house. The only catch is that the building is a duplex, and living on the top floor is the elderly Mrs. Connelly (Eileen Essell), a long-time resident who has no intention of moving out. Alex and Nancy buy the duplex, but it isn’t long before their upstairs tenant begins to make life difficult for them in every way imaginable. Fed up to the point of insanity, the two decide that the only way to deal with Mrs. Connelly is to get rid of her once and for all.
Like any decent black comedy worth its weight, Duplex is gloriously full of dark humor in ways both subtle and upfront. The script is loaded with slight jokes, such as when the Mrs. Connelly introduces Nancy and Alex to her pet parrot, whom she says was named after her late husband Richard, adding, “I’ve had little Dick for 14 years.” Other times, the humor in the script gets as dark as can be, like in the instance when Alex and Nancy sit in a bar with the former dreamily describing the various “humane” ways he would kill their upstairs tenant as soft music plays in the background. Meanwhile, physical moments such as Nancy getting electrocuted, Alex getting caught in an explosion, and the two almost getting crushed by the water-damaged upstairs ceiling (a hilarious scene in which Mrs. Connelly proclaims, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! I could have fallen right through!”) give the film plenty of traditional pratfall comedy.
I’ve always found DeVito one of the more interesting examples of an actor turned director. While he’s consistently favored a decidedly darker brand of humor, his choice of projects has always seemed to focus on the deep-seeded savagery that’s within all of us. Films like Throw Momma From the Train and The War of the Roses spotlight characters pushed to the brink of irrationality by forces they can no longer accept as a part of life. While DeVito’s darkest example of this can be found in 2002’s Death to Smoochy (a sadly misunderstood gem), Duplex is the quintessential DeVito film in that not only does he bring this ideology to the forefront, but he does so in a such a darkly hilarious way to show the pure lunacy of it all.
For all its comedic moments, the strongest aspect of Duplex remains its central premise; specifically, the sheer absurdity of it. The idea of a couple who want their dream home so badly that they’re willing to kill for it, while not improbable, is so wonderfully ludicrous that the notion alone is enough to prompt a laugh. Ultimately, though, Duplex works best as a comment on materialism and the lengths people will go to in order to achieve their idea of the perfect life. The packaged image of a dream house, job, and city continue to escalate with each passing decade as more and more people realize how much of an illusion it actually is.
Stiller and Barrymore are known for their comedic talents, and DeVito uses them to great effect here. The two actors shine in both the moments which require them to be deadpan and others when they are expected to be over the top. Likewise, the two leads have no problem with the physical aspects of the comedy, sharing the load equally and hilariously. Matching them perfectly is Essell, who manages to make Mrs. Connelly a figure that is both endearing and maddening at the same time.
Unsurprisingly, Duplex was a box office bomb. As it turns out, not many people wanted to see a film about a beautiful couple trying to kill an old woman because they wanted her apartment. Those who did see it however, quickly warmed to the film’s dark sense of humor. Critics likewise were disappointed by the film, most of whom felt it wasn’t DeVito’s best.
Whether the film is the director’s best or not, Duplex continues to stand out as not only the perfect black comedy, but the kind of film this column was built around. The movie caters to certain tastes for sure, but it’s also one of those titles which holds up the most prevalent aspects of modern life and displays them in ways which are all at once outrageously hilarious and deceptively telling.