Multiplicity (1996)
(In French, On TV, August 2019) The premise of Multiplicity sounds like a joke gone wrong: Let’s put two of my favourite actors in a single movie, and then add more of the same. That is: Let’s see Michael Keaton married with Andie MacDowell, and then let’s clone more Keatons. (Alas, there’s no cloning of MacDowell, which seems like a wasted opportunity.) This being a Harold Ramis comedy, things are bound to get funnier, so as our overworked protagonist clones himself first to handle his job and then to handle family duties, things get complicated—especially when he inexplicably doesn’t tell his wife about it, leading to further complications. The added comic touch comes when the clones clone themselves, resulting in a dangerously stupid copy-of-a-copy that provides a lot of comic relief. This being Keaton’s show, he gets to play off four characters often interacting in the same frame (the chest-bump shot is particularly effective), playing off a base character, an exaggerated-macho version, an exaggerated-sensitive one, and a terminally stupid alter ego. The plot frequently doesn’t make sense (with clones seemingly losing knowledge of what they knew prior to their cloning), but this is a comedy meant to play with a familiar SF device, not a rigorous extrapolation. Multiplicity is amiable enough, with enough thematic depths about the multiple roles that we’re all asked to play being literalized in a silly comedy.
