I have said before on this blog that I regard Jake Gyllenhaal as one of the finest actors of his generation, and can’t understand why he is not winning awards. He is so good that I now make a point to never miss any film he’s in. He has a knack of picking fairly solid scripts and roles, which he then somehow transforms through the force of his own charisma and talent into something memorable and exciting – Brothers, Love & Other Drugs, Source Code, End of Watch, and Prisoners, is quite a run of films in which he’s done this. Unfortunately, Enemy is where this run ends, although I have to admit his performance does somehow keep you from walking out of the theater, whereas you’d be long gone if it was any other actor in that role!

I wouldn’t say Enemy was “bad”. It was just really slow, really dull, and really vacuous. Part of it was the ponderous technique employed – the overbearing monster music, the piss-yellow camera filter, the long camera shots of people looking really “thoughtful”, the almost complete avoidance of dialog, the sledgehammer use of allegory. But what really doomed this film was the story itself. It’s astonishing how little actually happens in the course of the film. I swear, the first 50 minutes of Enemy could have, with a small amount of decently-written dialog, been compressed down to 10 minutes tops, maybe 5 minutes; I guess with a story this empty its easy to see why they might want to stretch everything out interminably. It’s maddening, though, how unimaginative this story is – basically, these two completely identical Jake Gyllenhaals discover each other’s presence in Toronto and, despite the utterly miraculous nature of this, and the amazing possibilities it opens up, all either of them can think to do is to set about trying to fuck each other’s wives.

When I went to see the Anita Hill documentary at Angelika last night, I was stunned to find that Enemy is still hanging on, three weeks after I saw it there in a near-empty theater. Has this film actually found some kind of audience in New York City? I say if you can’t control your curiosity about Enemy, at least wait until it streams on Netflix, so it won’t cost you anything.