The Face of Love is the second film this year to explore the idea of doppelgangers by casting the same actor in two different roles. The first was Richard Ayoade’s The Double in which nobody noticed that two polar opposite characters — one an arrogant go-getter, the other a nervous recluse — both looked exactly like Jesse Eisenberg.
In director Arie Posin’s The Face of Love, a middling romantic drama with a pseudo- intellectual twist, Nikki (Annette Bening) falls for a man who reminds her of her dead former husband. While she is shocked by the extent to which they resemble each other, the audience are not. Both men, after all, are played by Ed Harris, who exists on two plains, drifting into her memories while wooing her as a different person in real-life.
We meet Nikki by the pool as she gazes into the water, glass of wine at hand. Flashbacks introduce us to a beaming Garrett (Harris) who presents her a necklace. “Are you high?” she asks, to which Garrett responds “maybe just a little.” By the standards of insanity, temporary or otherwise, The Face of Love is high a lot: soon we see visions of hubby dead and face-up on a beach before we meet him again — but not really — in the present.
Poor Robin Williams, who mopes about with a face like a wet weekend, maintains an aura of constant concern as Nikki’s friend Roger, who has waited patiently for a crack at her hand but, unfortunately for him, doesn’t look anything like Ed Harris.
The doppelganger factor lends The Face of Love an intriguing “what if?” premise until it becomes clear Posin has no intention of doing anything with it other than communicating the equivalent of hey, this is awkward, isn’t it?
Well, yeah. It’s awkward not just because of the multiple Harris factor; the film is also awkward for plucking a dream cast — Bening, Harris, Williams — and giving them such weightless and uninspiring roles.
The Face of Love‘s curious concept would have been fitting for The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents. One of the finest episodes of Hitch’s show, The Strange Case of Mr Pelham, explored the idea of doppelgangers in fascinatingly abstract ways. But Posin’s film is straight-up drama despite Harris’ kooky casting. The mystery is treated neither as a logical one (both people look exactly the same, because they are) nor a symbolic one (the screenwriters insist this unusual situation is in fact utterly normal and coincidental) which makes it one gigantically unsatisfying excursion into nowhere in particular.
Add to the equation some gallingly bad dialogue — “I could take a bath in how you look at me,” Harris is forced to say, presumably by gun point — and you get the worst kind of lemon: a film not “normal” enough to satisfy audiences looking for conventional drama and nowhere near interesting enough to be considered an experiment, failed or otherwise.
This was first published at Daily Review.