Closer Review
by Karina Montgomery (karina AT cinerina DOT com)December 10th, 2004
Closer
Rental
Mike Nichols is one of those directors actors all want to work with; he elicits their trust and wrings extra-ordinary performances from them. Every interview is "Mike this and Mike that," and not so much about the film itself. Closer is no exception. With a tiny main cast performing Patrick Maker's screenplay from his own play, it's an intimate film made with big Hollywood faces about intimate things.
Interestingly, despite all the sexual shenanigans, infidelities major and minor, reunions and rejections, these people get anywhere but closer to each other. More entangled, they surely do become. All meeting through some unique and simple coincidence or accident, they eventually are intimately enmeshed in each other's angst and hearts, but they always remain seriously separated from any kind of true love, trust, intimacy, or happiness. The story lurches though time skips communicated very incidentally and only through dialogue; we have no visual cues or sense of season pull us along - it forces you to pay attention and not be lazy cineastes, but considering how it's difficult to care for such characters, it's also hard to keep up with their life changes as a result.
The characters are all basically pretty unlikeable, despite all being beautiful people. One must notice that we automatically respond slightly more favorably toward beautiful people; it's primal, genetic; quite often this response is belied by the undeveloped personalities that can inhabit someone who never had to work for acceptance. But this film, by the time it's all over, gives us little to love but the surface, the initial mystery of all these people who draw our eye and repel our soul. They are all insatiable, superficial, capricious, selfish, needy, driven. They are interesting, but experiencing them en masse here turned me off. All notions of kindness and honesty come up in the strangest ways - imagine someone who had betrayed you again and again ordering you to just be honest.
Natalie Portman gives a brave and flashy performance as Alice, a girl with a complicated history whose walls are tall and whose tales are taller. Those of us who knew Portman's work before she embarrassed herself by aligning with George Lucas will be pleased to find her back in her game. Her dewy, ethereal beauty contrasts deliciously with the perverse candidness of her words, even her coolly ATM-like "thank you."
Jude Law, also ethereally beautiful, as Dan, is a rapscallion and a lout and one who loves whimsically, easily, but with the depth of Paris Hilton's philosophical leanings. Law floats above the world, gazing down and imagining himself involved; and ladies, we've all known someone like him, am I right? We cannot take him seriously.
Julia Roberts is "Julia" as we know her - firey, resolute, charming, funny, vulnerable - or is she? Her photographer character is as disengaged from the world she inhabits as Law's, but with more potential for recovery. She was interesting to watch as someone not charmingly alpha female, or charmingly crazy, but genuinely plundering her way through life like a regular, foolish person.
Clive Owen's Larry was, to me, the least sympathetic character, and yet the one with the deepest levels, the one whose depths I could comprehend the most. I couldn't understand his obsessive alpha-maleness; it is well outside my personal experience and, after experiencing Larry, for that I am glad. He provides most of the incidental laughs, and much of the recoiling as well.
The performances are strong, the cinematography is lovely, but I came away with a bad taste in my mouth I simply cannot put into words. If you believe these people's life choices are for you, I wish you luck.
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These reviews (c) 2004 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks. You can check out previous reviews at:
http://www.cinerina.com and http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com - the Online Film Critics Society http://www.hsbr.net/reviews/karina/listing.hsbr - Hollywood Stock Exchange Brokerage Resource
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