David Cronenberg is a director driven by his own curiosities and instincts rather than the whims of the marketplace (one of the many reasons he's one of my favorite filmmakers), but it was still a considerably gutsy move to follow The Fly, a big hit that managed to work beautifully as both a popcorn monster-movie flick and a purely Cronenbergian art-horror movie about illness and loving someone who's ill, with Dead Ringers, the polar opposite of a popcorn flick. This is a movie that can't help but push the popular audience away, and though it was a critical success, Dead Ringers did not make The Fly's big bucks.
Loosely based on the novel Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland (which was itself loosely based on the true story of Cyril and Stewart Marcus ⸺ look that up if you want your mind blown), Dead Ringers almost happened in 1981, the rushed nature of the financing forcing Cronenberg to delegate screenplay duties to a writer he'd worked with in Canadian television, Norman Snider. The financing evaporated as quickly as it arrived, and Cronenberg extensively rewrote Snider's screenplay when he was finally able to make the film in 1988. After William Hurt and Robert De Niro turned down the parts (De Niro was uncomfortable with the subject matter while Hurt told Cronenberg it was hard enough to play one role), Cronenberg struck gold with his third choice, Jeremy Irons. It's hard to imagine anyone else in these roles.
Irons plays identical twin brothers Beverly and Elliot Mantle, Toronto gynecologists who share a high-rise apartment, a private practice that specializes in improving fertility in women who are having trouble getting pregnant, and (without the other parties' knowledge) patients and romantic partners (who, wildly unethically, are sometimes patients). Elliot is outwardly more confident, outgoing, schmoozy, and manipulative, while Beverly is introverted, more research-focused, and insecure in social situations. In what could have been a stupid evil-twin/good-twin gimmick in a much stupider film, the twins in Cronenberg's movie are complex, disturbed, and fragilely human, and Irons pulls off the extremely difficult job of making each twin distinct in scenes where you need to know which man is which and making it hard to tell them apart in scenes where it's vital their identities be fuzzier.
Geneviéve Bujold plays Claire Niveau, a famous actress shooting a miniseries in Toronto and the newest patient at the Mantles' clinic. She hasn't been able to conceive, and the brothers discover she has a rare mutation that has created three cervixes. Claire is a highly intelligent woman and almost as unconventional as the Mantles (she's sympathetic but mysterious, and her character is further complicated when we see her icily and calmly verbally destroy the miniseries' costume designer). She begins dating Beverly despite him being her gynecologist (she's excited by how beautiful he finds her internal mutation; classic Cronenberg), but once she learns about the existence of Elliot, she catches on almost immediately to being the victim of the ol' switcheroo and drops the brothers fast.
Cronenberg avoids some of the wild set-piece scenes from his previous work in favor of a quieter, subtler, and more claustrophobic dread. It's a very still, controlled film, almost all tension with almost no release, though the editing gets quicker and the scenes shorter as the brothers unravel. It's still unmistakably a Cronenberg film, but it also marks the transition in his work from his incredible body horror films (with the exception of 1979's Fast Company, a drive-in movie outlier about race car drivers that's more of a fun little un-Cronenbergian b-movie except for the very Cronenbergian approach to filming the races) to movies that are harder to place in specific genres and that emphasize psychology just as much as or more than biology (his next three movies were Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly, and Crash, the J.G. Ballard adaptation about people aroused by car accidents, not the horrible Paul Haggis pandering white liberal Oscarbait movie of the same title). Some people prefer '70s and '80s Cronenberg, some people like the later stuff, but I'm a huge fan of his whole career.
This movie could have gone so wrong in so many ways, but Cronenberg maintains such delicate control of the tone, Irons and Bujold nail the tone (Irons as Elliot delivering the line "thank you, Shawn" to a waiter is one of my favorite line deliveries in cinema), and the set decorations, costume design (by Cronenberg's sister Denise), cinematography (the first of many Cronenberg collaborations with Peter Suschitzky), and smaller supporting performances (especially Heidi von Palleske and Canadian painter Stephen Lack, delivering the second of his two small but memorable Cronenberg roles (he was also in Scanners)) all come together beautifully. This is another great movie from my boy DC. It plays better every time I watch it. He has a new one coming soon called The Shrouds and you know I'll be there on opening weekend.
I'll leave you with a couple of wild connections between Dead Ringers and big-budget Hollywood comedies of the '80s. Despite looking like Cronenberg-designed creations, the bizarre stainless steel gynecological instruments Beverly creates after he starts losing control were actually borrowed props from Little Shop of Horrors, where they were the dental tools wielded by Steve Martin's sadistic dentist character. They were reused the next year as plastic surgery instruments in Tim Burton's Batman. Those are some versatile tools.
