Closer Review
by Harvey S. Karten (harveycritic AT cs DOT com)December 4th, 2004
CLOSER
Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Columbia Pictures
Grade: B
Directed by: Mike Nichols
Written by: Patrick Marber, based on Marber's play
Cast: Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen Screened at: Loews 84th St., NYC, 12/2/04
If you want to know why people are unhappy, why there's a 50% divorce rate in the U.S. even though families are supposed to be supportive, there's any number of films above the PG level that show us human beings as miserable, lonely, neurotically self-destructive. If you want to know why people are deceitful, devious, misanthropic, take a look at about half of the above movies. Sometimes a writer or director will make clear what's going on under the surface, digging deeply into our emotional make-up to gain some kind of explanation. In other cases, a director or writer will not really care about the why, but will certainly give us proof that life is not a bowl of cherries. In this latter case, what separates a film that's just plain tedious from one that puts us on the edge of our seats, our ears reaching out to the screen, the answer is probably the writing. Neil LaBute, to take one example, is the master at depicting folks who are cunning and neurotically playful, and he does so without passing judgment on the most evil of them. He's a cool director, his writing is observant, and he gets the most out of his
performers.
Mike Nichols is also suited for films of this nature, having directed "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (which in 1966 broke Hollywood taboos for adult material) and "Carnal Knowledge" (a depressing look at the sexual attitudes of two male friends from college through middle age). In Nichols' "Closer," which has been adapted by Patrick Marber from his own hit London play of 1997, we are shown four people whose relationships intertwine, people who could be happy if they were not so damn hostile, the men worse than the women. If the dialogue is not up to Neil LaBute's, it is nonetheless clever, even arch, with theatrically stylized performances evoked from the four principles by a director experienced in the required technique.
Nichols introduces us to a diverse quartet, men and women who are difficult to care about, but caring about the characters is not necessarily a requisite for a movie. The most likable character, at least until the conclusion of the story when she lets loose against one of the men in her life, is Natalie Portman in the role of an American stripper who has taken the name Alice and is now working the poles in a posh London gentlemen's club. In a scene near the opening of the story, she is hit by a cab, knocked down (a metaphor for her life?), her superficial wounds treated in a hospital emergency room where she is accompanied by a witness, the handsome Dan (Jude Law)–a writer of obituaries for the local paper and an aspiring novelist.
In one of quite a few jumps in time, Nichols takes us quickly forward to Dan, who has gone to a professional photographer, Anna (Julie Roberts), posing for a picture to appear on the jacket of his first novel. The book is semi-autobiographical, dealing principally with his relationship over the years with Alice, with whom he shares a flat. Anna and Dan click, and a new relationship begins on the not-yet ruins of the present one.
Our fourth character, Larry (Owen) is a dermatologist who, logging on to an internet chat room responds to a message from Dan, who pretends to be a woman desiring to meet him for a liaison. By this method, Larry runs into Anna in a museum and thinking this is the woman from the ‘net, begins a humorous flirtation through which the two click.
In a sense this film looks as though it takes off like Arthur Schnitzler's play La Ronde, about an ever-increasing circle of inter-relationships–except that in Nichols' film we're dealing with just the four. What's clear is that while the template is "Alfie," the language, the archness, the deviousness embraces anything but that good-natured pic, as Dan and Larry are no ordinary womanizers like Alfie.
While playwright-scripter Marber uses no wasted words–the dialogue is clever, dense, witty–the technique of making great leaps in time is confusing. There is not even a subtitle such as "four years later," but more important there is no reason to resort to a technique that perhaps makes the film more hip by challenging us to fill in the blanks. The production design is ultra-urban, highly sophisticated, consisting of a photographer's spacious studio, a strip club far more upscale than anything you'll see in New York's Times Square (so I'm told), and the kind of art gallery you'll find in all major Western cities where trendy people meet, drink Chardonnay, and may even observe paintings or photos while they flirt.
Rated R. 110 minutes. © 2004 by Harvey Karten
@harveycritic.com
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