Ill-Informed Gadfly

I rented this 1988 curiosity because I wanted to become more conversant in David Cronenberg after his exhilarating “Eastern Promises” and his overrated but still noteworthy “A History of Violence.” I still haven’t seen enough to pin him down entirely — probably a good sign — although it doesn’t take a genius to notice his visual and thematic obsessions, like split personalities and our unease about the substances that make up our bodies. Aside from the two recent titles — which appear to have brought Cronenberg his widest and most unified acclaim — I’ve also seen “Videodrome” and “eXistenZ,” both of them astonishing. But the chief amazement in “Dead Ringers” is not Cronenberg’s direction but Jeremy Irons’s towering central performance as twin gynecologists. Yep, that’s right — Cronenberg isn’t above a gimmicky premise, but he always explores the implications of the setup with a serious and restless mind. Irons uses everything in his arsenal to distill the similarities and differences between Drs. Elliot and Beverly Mantle, who specialize in helping women conceive. In their personal lives, they share everything — sex partners included. And early on — thanks to Irons’s and Cronenberg’s shrewd work — it’s nearly impossible to tell the brothers apart. But Beverly grows dissatisfied with their divide-and-fornicate strategy when Elliot seduces fading movie star Claire Niveau (Genevieve Bujold). Beverly falls for her; worse, he begins to share her proclivity for pill-popping. Resentments between the brothers begin to surface, and their differences become more pronounced. There’s so much rich psychosexual terrain for Irons and Cronenberg to explore that it’s disappointing that “Dead Ringers” devolves into a cautionary tale about drug abuse. Beverly becomes an addict, and in trying to cure him, Elliot descends as rapidly — and implausibly — into pharmaceutically induced madness as Erika Christensen in “Traffic.” Still, “Dead Ringers” remains powerful, thanks to Irons’s flawless work — he has said in interviews that he wouldn’t have won the Oscar for “Reversal of Fortune” if not for this movie — and Cronenberg’s affinity for deeply troubling imagery. (That he stages scenes between Irons and Irons so seamlessly is just a small example of his mastery of the medium.)