Film Review: CLOSER ** (out of 5)
Partner and allegiance swapping between two trendy couples in contemporary London.
Because Closer is a Mike Nichols movie, and because it’s adapted from a successful play, has only four characters, and those four characters seem to lift the bar on just how dirty people are allowed to talk in an American movie, there were a lot of pre-release comparisons between it and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Nichols’ stunning directorial debut from so many years ago. But there the comparisons should end; it’s not just that Closer’s playwright, Patrick Marber, is no Edward Albee (nor am I saying he should try to be), it’s that the whole cultural landscape has changed irrevocably. The movies are different, obviously successful plays are different, and most especially, movie stars are different.
Mike Nichols has stayed the same, less showy than he used to be, less hip, more intent on directing actors with precision, more likely to step aside and shoot the movie in whatever way is best to tell the story. But he’s always had a streak of nihilism, a streak that served him well in some cases (the one-two punch of Virginia Woolf followed immediately by The Graduate), not so much in others (a failed adaptation of Catch-22, the hopelessness of Carnal Knowledge). When Mike Nichols turns dark, he is tempted toward a slumping whatever-ism that can trump his sense of wit, drama and style.
The problem is always in the story he chooses to tell. In the case of Patrick Marber’s Closer, Nichols must have felt it taps into the zeitgeist, but if it does, then the climate of our era has become simpleminded, vacuous and shrill (and that may be, that may be). Certainly, Closer opens with some promising, witty repartee, as the central figure Dan (Jude Law) meets two women whom he will try to seduce and control, both expatriate Americans living in London: Alice (Natalie Portman) is a young stripper from New York, trying to escape a clinging ex-lover; Anna (Julia Roberts) is a photographer, a grown-up who just wants to do her work without complications. Dan has his way with both of them and then, through a barely believable coincidence in an Internet chat room, brings in Larry (Clive Owen) to gum up the works by falling in love with Anna.
All of this happens in about fifteen minutes of screen time, so I haven’t spoiled anything for the unwary. It is a needlessly complicated set-up, and once it is in place, any wit in the film’s conversations becomes marginalized and Closer becomes less and less about the way men and women flirt and fight, more and more about bed-hopping and wounded egos. And that is all that it is about: these four people screw each other figuratively and literally until we lose track of who did what to whom, or why we should care. No one has an inner life in this movie, no one’s actions have any impact on the world outside their empty and aimless quartet, it is truly an opus for a cultural moment that deals strictly in the surface of things, that believes only in appearances. No, that’s not quite true: one of these characters does have a smidgen of mystery, but since it involves something we cannot know or suspect until the final moments of the movie, the undercurrent doesn’t do much for the drama while it is happening. You’ll have to see the movie again to see how that plays, I guess.
On the unsurprising side there is some very good acting going on in this movie, and that is where it generates whatever subtext it might have. Julia Roberts is fine in the most thankless of the four roles, shedding her usual toothy arrogance to portray someone besides herself. Her Anna seems to be a thinking, feeling person, but that is not the script at work, it’s Roberts being in the moment and the camera catching it. Likewise, Jude Law is a good actor who can deliver whatever a role demands, but here he is stuck in callow mode, delivering a dim-witted, would-be ladies’ man who has no clue to the damage he might cause, either to himself or others.
Natalie Portman and Clive Owen fare much better, stealing whatever there is to steal from their scenes. Perhaps it is because their characters are a touch more likeable, victims of a sex war who are forced to kick it into survival gear. Or perhaps it’s because they’re both born movie stars, unique performers with an enviable, indefinable something only the camera can explain.
Portman’s cache is to be real underneath her pristine surface, and often acerbic and worldly before her time (qualities which are smothered in the Star Wars prequels by the sheer tonnage of CGI heaped around her). It was almost a no-brainer to cast her in this film as a stripper who may have one vulnerable spot left. Owen, meanwhile, has started to become known to American audiences, thanks to films like the cult hit Croupier (1998), because of the remarkable hint of danger and unpredictability in his bearing. He was in the original stage production of Closer eight years ago, where he played the role now filled by Law, and that must have been something to see, because here he turns Larry into the heart of the film through sheer force of personality, and a great actor’s ability to make you think he’s right no matter what he’s saying.
Except he isn’t right. No one is “right” in Closer, least of all the author, who has taken the eternal malaise of infidelity as his subject and drained it of meaning, gravity and/or genuine consequence. Perhaps Mr. Marber accepts the prevailing notion that these things are no longer important in drama, because we’ve discovered that truth, like space, is relative to the observer. Everyone betrays everyone else in Closer, the script dividing people into two types — those who can take it, and betray as good as they’ve been betrayed, and those who can’t. In other words, people just suck, all of them, and then you die.
It’s a pretty adolescent point of view, made sleek and palatable by minimalist theatrical tropes like pared down dialogue and characters who represent ideas more readily than they do real people. And some great color cinematography by Stephen Goldblatt. I don’t know about anyone else, but it’s my experience that there are people you cannot trust, and then again, there are people you can. Closer, in its grim simplicity, forgets to account for the second phenomenon, coming off as mean-spirited and shallow, forgiving no one and never getting close, as it were, to examining the boundaries of love and trust. It just circles the perimeter, capturing pictures of people talking dirty.
Closer
directed by Mike Nichols; screenplay by Patrick Marber, from his play; director of photography, Stephen Goldblatt; edited by John Bloom, Antonia Van Drimmelen; music by
with: Natalie Portman (Alice), Jude Law (Dan), Julia Roberts (Anna), Clive Owen (Larry)
1 hr., 38 m.; Columbia-Sony Pictures, rated R
DVD release date: March 29
