Biopic. R. 1 hour, 48 minutes. At the Mayan.
Dominic Cooper goes positively Pacino in “The Devil’s Double,” a film biography of a real-life Iraqi “Scarface” and the poor sap ordered to be his stand-in.
Cooper brilliantly portrays both Uday Hussein, the singularly sadistic son of Saddam, and the fatalistic, fearful Latif Yahia, a former schoolmate of Uday’s yanked out of the army and told to impersonate the dictator’s son so that anybody who wanted to kill him — and potential assassins were legion — would take a shot or swipe at Latif and not the real Uday.
“We could be twins, no?” Uday says when Yahia is summoned to his office. He makes his offer in an instant. “I want you to be my brother. Think it over. You have . . . 10 minutes!”
What the Iraqi heir to Saddam was offering was wine, women and every vice under the desert sun — the trappings of staggering wealth, cars, suites in palaces — and the omnipotence of dictatorial power. To refuse Uday his every desire — your daughter, your bride on her wedding day, your duty to serve him — was to risk torture and death. There was no one to rein him in, and his appetite for sin and violence seemingly knew no bounds.
Lee Tamahori’s film, freely adapted from Yahia’s life story, captures the temptations of a life without rules and without limits, and the horrors of the trap that a life lived at the whim of a psychopath truly is.
And Cooper delivers a career-making performance, mastering two men chained to each other by circumstance and both riding the whirlwind that life in Saddam’s Iraq must have been.
