InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 16

magazine writer working on an expose — it’s a cascade of false
starts and half-thoughts trailing off before they ever get
anywhere interesting. This undercooked quality is most
pronounced with the reorientated focus on the politics of
reproductive health. This shift, defined by the Mantle twins’
gender swap, might promise to be the series' greatest strength, a
timely and clever inversion of some of the prickly, misogynistic
undertones in the original brothers' psychology. But just like in
the aforementioned threads, this too is presented in
Twitter-bent one-liners and scattershot fragments that never
have space to breathe.
Accompanying the overstuffed scope of ideas is a similarly
overstuffed stylization, presented in anamorphic widescreen to
give ample room for the twins to share the frame. Where
Cronenberg’s version avoided stressing its central gimmick, the
miniseries embraces it with relish and abandon, collecting both
Weiszs together in a shot as much as possible. Similarly absent
is the restraint of the original’s visuals. Peter Suschitzky’s muted
palette resembled a soap opera, lulling the viewer into an uneasy
calm, only to blossom in spectacular moments like a bondage
scene featuring rubber tubing and medical clamps shot in woozy
blues, or the gloom of the operating theater pierced with the
smoldering crimson of the Mantles’ surgical garb. Birch’s version
nods at some of these ideas, but strikes a frustrating
middle-ground of colorful, nicely framed banality that plays like
microwaved leftovers. All this is goaded on by a snappy musical
score and punctuated by an endless parade of tacky needle
drops. If Cronenberg bemoaned the cost of featuring a single
song in his film (“In The Still of the Night'' by The Five Satins), it’s
tough to imagine what his reaction would be to this soundtrack,
so stuffed with overused hits — “Sweet Dreams,” “Tainted Love,”
and so forth — that it chugs along almost like a jukebox musical.
There are some bright spots here and there. Weisz’s take on the
twins may lack nuance — Jeremy Irons’ performance remains
untouched — but it makes up for it in campy exuberance, which,
accompanied by some devilishly funny writing and a strong
supporting cast, helps keep things gliding along. Particular
standouts include Jennifer Ehle’s razor-witted Rebecca Parker,
the caustic investor the Mantles have to beg for funding for their
birthing centers, and Ntare Guma Mbhaho Mwine as a writer
digging into the Mantles, stealing every single scene he’s in with
relaxed poise and finely tuned, simmering charm. Where the
show really stumbles, however, is in building its emotional
backbone. Weisz has no chemistry with Britne Oldford, who plays
Beverly’s lover, an issue compounded by the fact that Beverely’s
character has been restructured in such a way as to become an
idealistic husk of what he once was. In the original, Beverly was
the more empathetic of the two, but far less predictable,
susceptible to addiction and psychological breakdown. Elliot was
colder, crueler, and more playful, but defined by a calm
demeanor and a rigid sense of control. Instead, Birch’s version
sanctifies Beverly and transfers all flaws over to Elliot. Out of
everything that frustrates in this Dead Ringers, its oversimplified,
good twin/bad twin dichotomy is most destructive to the heart
of the source material.
By the time you’ve made it to the sixth and final episode, the
incongruities in theme and tone and the sheer number of
abandoned plot threads start to seem like insurmountable
failings. The show races toward its ending with the sweaty
energy of a series canceled halfway through, one desperately
trying to cobble together a satisfying conclusion amidst its final
throes. Following the trend set by every poorly thought-through
deviation from the source material leading up to it thus far, Birch
declines the original’s beautifully cutting closer in favor of a
broader, tackier, and more predictable finale. The muddled
nature of this desperate final bow stands in stark contrast to the
quiet dignity of Cronenberg’s operatic ending, a move that seems
to be at total odds with the warmer, more empathetic approach
toward the Mantles that the series until this point exhibits. Maybe
the most charitable reading here would be that the disjointed
flow from one episode to the next suggests that each should be
seen as improvisations on a theme — siblings, parents, class,
motherhood — and yet, as poorly as these work as a whole, they
seem even more wanting in isolation. The ultimate takeaway
here is that, tempting as it may be, trying to xerox the dark
alchemy of Cronenbergian narrative is certainly
a fool’s errand. Cronenberg’s discordant themes, at once
excessive and elegant, aren’t threaded together but instead
violently fused; the final, imitative product that is this Dead
Ringers mini-series is a fender-bender enervated by caution,
whereas the real deal was an expressway collision, its potency
crawling up your spine — glass, metal, and protruding flesh. —
IGOR FISHMAN
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