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| Closer
Directed By: Mike Nichols Plot
Summary - Review 1 - Review
2 - CURRENT REVIEWS
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| An intriguing story of passion, drama, love, and abandonment involving two couples, which only gets more complicated when the man from the first couple gets acquainted with the woman from the second coupling. [TRAILER] “Closer” is a brave movie, one of those films that risks alienating certain segments of the audience in taking its discussion to a higher level. I shudder to think how many eager Julia Roberts or Jude Law fans meandered into “Closer” last weekend, expecting an optimistic movie about overcoming the challenges of love or the struggles of temptation. Instead, what they got was something far more searing and cynical. This is a story about the shallow games and power plays two couples mistake for love, and the primal sexual forces and hollow gestures that keep them busy, but leave them empty in the end. It is a dark and bleak movie, one that will resonate most strongly for those who have played these games, and seen these gestures before. Thanks to an exhaustive marketing blitz, most already know the basic setup: Two couples - Anna (Julia Roberts) and Larry (Clive Owen), and Dan (Jude Law) and Alice (Natalie Portman) – find their lives upturned as they succumb to their inner desires and swap partners. But buyers beware: All is not as simple as it appears. In reality, each of these characters portrays a different faction of the romantic world. Anna is the divorced photographer who is torn between lust and restraint, driven by her impulses but also feeling guilty for her transgressions. Larry is her dapper but crude boyfriend, the dominating and aggressive type, who meets Anna through one of Dan’s pranks involving an online porn site. Dan is an obituary writer for a London newspaper, the sort of guy who pretends to be sophisticated in the ways of love but is really needy and desperate. And Alice is the immature girl, torn between living the grounded life of a waitress in love, or returning to the stripping world where sex is not something sincere, but a commodity to be bartered. Based on the Patrick Marber play, “Closer” is very much a world of words, and in stunning scenes of verbal confrontation these characters attack and retreat, test and manipulate, and discuss sex in ways that will make jaws drop. They are not so much real characters as they are chess pieces for Marber’s manipulation, existing to explore these ideas and confront these issues. No doubt some will be surprised by this fact, as “Closer” slowly deteriorates from a film of sweet people falling in love to a hostile thesis on love’s fallouts and traumas. Director Mike Nichols (“Primary Colors”) accentuates this approach, ignoring character development and flashing forward in time to juxtapose the sweet beginnings with the bitter endings, casting both as equally fake and empty. Brave is not a word I use often, but here it is clearly deserved. “Closer” is not smoothed over, but rough and jagged, seeing past the smiles and kisses to the selfish agendas and betrayals. And all the film’s performances break type and formula. Roberts is not strong but weak, Portman not sweet but pathetic and shrewd, Law not suave but desperate, and Owen not charismatic but genuinely disturbing. Those who married their high school sweethearts may not get “Closer.” It will seem too dark in much the same way that I see most romances as too ideal. But for those like me, who have been hurt and never fully recovered, the contrast between the film’s first scene and last will be appreciated. Using Damien Rice’s song “Blower’s Daughter,” the opening is a hopeful meditation that our perfect someone is out there, just waiting to be found. But the last scene is a far angrier one, suggesting that, whether man vs. woman or love vs. sex, it’s all just a tantalizing, painful, and ultimately meaningless game.
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