Closer to Fine
Mike Nichols’ new film Closer is a boiling pot of lust, mistrust and double-dealing that might well be taken for outright soap opera — or soft-core porn — were it not for the sophisticated gleam of its well-heeled London desperadoes and the vicious dazzle of its dialogue. Adapted from a bitterly funny 1997 play by the British playwright and former stand-up comic Patrick Marber, this wallow in contemporary bad behavior is full of intellectual stimulation as well as low, dark pleasures — Carnal Knowledge redux! Every time you catch yourself in a guilty thrill (a lewd, barking quarrel about fellatio, for instance), the movie lets you off the hook because it’s so damned smart.
Unlike the midday atrocities of the boob tube, Closer is also beautifully acted by a quartet of perfectly chosen players. In Nichols’ able hands, the delicate beauty Natalie Portman (last seen in Garden State), matinee idol Jude Law, and brooding Croupier lead Clive Owen make for fascinating combatants in an all-out war in which sex is the ultimate weapon. The surprise is Julia Roberts, who finally shows something undeniably real here as a self-absorbed portrait photographer with a gift for emotional destruction. Roberts’ Anna, who uses her obsession with truth to bludgeon the men in her life (and herself), looks and feels like her first really authentic character.
Moviegoers who think drama is disabled by sheer nastiness probably won’t enjoy the ironically titled Closer very much. Each of the needy, bed-swapping urban savages we meet here has his or her own talent for cruelty — though some are more adept than others. Portman’s Alice is a gorgeous, calculating waif recently transplanted from New York, where she apparently worked as a stripper until some unnamed crisis drove her across the Atlantic. Literally by accident, she collides with Dan (Law), a handsome but grotesquely insecure obituary writer (there’s a gig for you) who ransacks Alice’s life to furnish a steamy but unsuccessful novel. En route to the remainders bin, Dan submits to a photo shoot in Anna’s fashionable loft, promptly falls for her, and declares his life ruined when she initially spurns him. Dan’s lying misadventure in a pornographic chat room unwittingly draws in character number four, who may be the most odious of the bunch. Larry (Owen) is a dermatologist who makes your skin crawl; his taste for degradation knows no bounds. This Neanderthal MD’s notion of the human heart? It’s “a fist wrapped in blood.”
Driven by self-interest and animal instinct, these four people — largely untroubled by conscience or consequence — set out to satisfy their appetites, which is certainly not to be confused with looking for love. In their characters’ erotic flailings, Nichols and Marber see not just obsession but imprisonment. This is a relentlessly sexy movie — the strip-club scene in which Alice torments the desperate Larry with her naked detachment is a masterpiece of cold heat — but it might also be monumentally depressing if not for the playwright’s scathing humor and the veteran director’s impeccable manipulation of it.
As he did so ably four decades ago in the movie version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Nichols tempers Marber’s verbal lacerations with perfectly timed wisecracks. Nichols doesn’t show us Closer‘s ever-shifting relationships in their entirety (we get only the starts and finishes of Anna-with-Larry or Larry-with-Alice or Anna-with-Dan), but he has a gift for cutting into the essence of each to find the comic delusions and dark deceptions inside.
Unhappy with everything this side of Donald Duck, neocons who dare to watch this disturbing, bleakly funny meditation on sexual Darwinism will see another sign that the apocalypse is upon us. In the end, broader minds may also find themselves wearied and worn, as if they’ve been in a bar fight or inundated by more bad news from Fallujah. But Nichols, Marber and this terrific cast refuse to let up, and that is to be admired: This relentless brawl among emotional cripples has the kind of bruising authenticity most movies only dream of.
