Duplex: Movie & DVD Review (2003)

(Originally published 2003)

Danny DeVito’s “Duplex,” the dark comedy about how buying a house can destroy your life, stars Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore as Alex and Nancy, a young Manhattan couple longing for roomier quarters but unable to afford them without first moving out of the city and into a more reasonably priced borough.

With the help of their realtor, Kenneth (Harvey Fierstein), they find exactly what they’re seeking in Brooklyn, a gorgeous duplex that seems almost too perfect—three fireplaces, original woodwork, period stained glass, rooms the size of small cathedrals, charm, charm, charm.

Sure, living in the upstairs apartment is the widow Mrs. Connelly (Eileen Essell), a sweet, elderly woman with a nasty cough who legally can’t be removed from her rent-controlled abode unless, of course, she agrees to move or, in fact, dies. Still, to Alex and Nancy, that cough of hers is especially promising, as is Mrs. Connelly’s advanced age, which teeters somewhere near an obituary-friendly 105.

With the odds stacked in their favor that Mrs. Connelly has knitted her last shawl, Alex and Nancy buy the property, hedging their bets that they’ll soon have the entire duplex to themselves.

But when they move in, Mrs. Connelly actually proves rather spry, just healthy enough to become the tenant from hell, so demanding in her requests for assistance and so impossible in her nighttime antics, that Alex can’t finish his second novel, Nancy gets fired from her magazine job, and both are driven mad to the point of considering murder.

DeVito’s directing career has been a string of outrageous black comedies--“The War of the Roses,” “Throw Momma From the Train” and “Death to Smoochy” chief among them. He has the sort of twisted sense of humor that touches a nerve we’d probably rather not recognize as our own, but which DeVito nevertheless asserts is human. In this case, he takes a typical urban couple, both professionals driven to conquer life’s upward climb, and throws a little old woman in the path to achieving their dreams.

What springs from this may not be DeVito’s best movie, but it does have its moments, a controlled farce that finds Stiller, Barrymore and Essell mining several big laughs while DeVito, the cynic, complicates matters--and deepens the dysfunction--with a final surprise twist.

Grade: B