By Jonathan Small, Film Critic
Michael Jackson once said, “The greatest education is watching the masters at work.” If any one was ever confused about how to make a great movie, simply direct them to watch the Devil’s Double, and that should dispel as doubt.
From opening credits to final scene this film is an absolute master piece of film making, crammed with equal parts history, and art into one, vivid experience. It is as if director Lee Tamahori found a way to pull your head back, and pour liquid entertainment directly into your skull.
Words honestly can not do it justice. Historical fiction is always a dodgy area to film, but he strikes the appropriate balance of dramatizing it enough to be interesting, but keeping the story enough to be accurate too. He then boils it down to exactly what he needs to make his point: every scene delivers a message. There is no wasted energy in this production. What he wants to accomplish he does, and then he skillfully moves on as he packs 108 minutes with so much story that it will boggle your mind.
With that said, fact is stranger than fiction. This is the kind of story that no American yuppie, holed up in a home office with a PC, could have ever dreamed up. Latif Yahia experienced some wild things as a body double for Uday Hussein, and we are just thankful that he was able to live this story, and then survive to tell the tale.
We spend nearly the entirety of the film on Dominic Cooper, literally just watching him interact with a limited cast of supporting characters. However we never get the feeling that we have just spend the better part of two hours on one actor, because he practically divides into two people, playing the level headed Latif Yahia opposite his own psychotic, hedonistic Uday Hussein.
During the movie we follow the stories of the two men as they interwine, and then afterward have to wrap our heads around the fact that it was just ONE GUY. Philip Quast gets a few moments on screen as Saddam Hussein, and his body double.
There is never any confusion about which man he is supposed to be, because he commands the scene with a firm, threatening assertiveness whenever he portrays Saddam.
He makes the other actors cower, demonstrating a fantastic interplay between Quast, and Cooper as two tremendous talents on screen.
This is the kind of movie that stays with you. It engrosses audiences so thoroughly that leaving the theatre is like groggily waking up from a deep nap, and realizing that we never actually were in the company of Iraqi politicians.
This combination of talent just tricked our brains into believing it. Then again some of you may not like this film. To that I say: if the Devil’s Double is not the best movie you have seen all year, I would like to know what is, because I can not WAIT to see it.
