Originally posted 1/11/05
Closer
Director: Mike Nichols
Writer: Patrick Marber, based on his play
Producers: Mike Nichols, John Calley, Cary Brokaw, Robert Fox
Stars: Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen
I prefer it when movies are About Something over when they Say Something. Closer, based on Patrick Marber’s award-winning play, is a bit of the former and a great deal of the latter, but has the presumption to treat the Something it is Saying – that people lie, screw around, abuse others and don’t really know what they want out of the opposite sex – as news. Yes, I find myself saying, and…? While it’s surprising to hear Julia Roberts, queen of PG-13 platonicism, comparing the flavor of two mens’ emissions, I don’t know that by itself it constitutes a good movie.
It is a long-standing grief of mine that nobody makes movies for grown-ups anymore, so perhaps I should be grateful for Closer’s mere existence, since it is decidedly that. But it comes off as middlebrow satire, witty but mostly quaint when it’s meant to be devastating. I want more.
Danny (Jude Law), who writes obituaries for a living but would rather write novels, makes goggle-eyes across an intersection at a stripper who calls herself Alice (Natalie Portman). She seems equally charmed, then gets hit by a car. He helps her, shows her around London, when we next catch up with them she has moved in and he’s about to get a novel published mostly based on her life – at least, what she has told him of her life.
His book jacket photo is being taken by Anna (Roberts), who is separated and cautious. Danny pursues her casually and callously, not caring that Alice is waiting downstairs. Anna is interested but rebuffs him.
As some sort of vengeful prank Danny poses as Anna in an internet sex chat room, luring a lustful doctor (Clive Owen) to an aquarium at which Anna happens to enjoy spending time. In spite of the awkward misunderstanding of their meeting, they hit it off and get married.
And there our four principles are on the stage and talking. Almost exclusively in successive pairs, they have dialogues about loneliness, and sex, and jealousy, and sex, and whichever of the two presently off-stage characters they have had sex with recently, and how good it was. Then they trade off like partners in a square dance and another dialogue starts. Closer is not a bedroom farce being played at 33rpm, though the characters switch chambers often enough. At one point Larry the doctor confesses he slept with a prostitute while on a business trip, and I think the only reason he did it was to keep pace with the others.
I don’t mind movies about people who are generally nasty with one another, but what is most frustrating about Closer, is that the characters’ screen time seems to be directly related to the opacity of their emotional motives. Jude Law drives most of the action, professing to desperately love each of the female leads in turn, yet treating each with cruel disregard whenever he actually has them.
Which is not the point, though I kind of wish it was; the movie charts his evolution as that of someone who realizes The Truth only after he has made One Too Many Mistakes. But I defy you, examining his behavior in retrospect, to decide conclusively which love is genuine, if either.
The strongest character in the movie by far, and by the rule above then the one least on stage, is Larry the lustful doctor. Although he has as active a sex drive as anyone in the movie and acts out of incisive and chilling malice when his relationship is threatened by Danny, his wants and wounds are never ambiguous. Of everyone in the movie, he is the only one who seems to feel intimacy in its raw form, and the irony is this makes him smartest about inflicting damage on everyone else. You like him because as low and vile as he gets, you at least have a clear sense of how he got there.
You never forget that you are watching a filmed play, the dialogue has that stylized breathing room to it where every conversation feels like just another round of hormonal Ping Pong. And yet Nichols doesn’t film it remotely like a play, giving actors long takes in frame together. He cuts busily and the result is a movie that looks like TV, at once handsome and dull. By staying married to dialogue that is meant to simmer while filming in this style, there’s an unquantifiable loss of energy that may be at the heart of just why this movie fails to get enough of a rise out of me.
The actors are uniformly committed to the material and any spark the movie achieves comes from them. Roberts seems out of her depth trying to play buttoned-up and self-loathing, and generates no real heat with Law. Since her seduction by him underpins the action of the entire movie, that they don’t sell it is troubling. Law displays an interesting blend of impulse control problems but doesn’t seem to grasp Danny firmly.
Natalie Portman gives a solid, sexy grown-up performance as a young woman whose life is a series of calculated revelations and half-truths that she keeps hoping will come to an end. The scene where she strips for Larry while he, at his wit’s end, tries to bribe her real name out of her is the movie’s one perfect moment, where its conceit seems finally to come together and crackle.
And consistently, every time the movie comes even close is when Clive Owen is on the screen. Larry is his best role since his break-through in Croupier and the biggest reason why this movie generates any passion at all in me.
I admire the effort, and certainly the talent assembled, in Closer. Mike Nichols has directed brilliant films and hopefully will do so again. But this movie just misses its bravely-chosen target. Maybe we’re all just out of practice.