Closer

directed by Mike Nichols
screenplay by Patrick Marber based on his play
 
starring:  Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Clive Owen

       The opening of Closer feigns romantic comedy with a chance meet-cute:  Dan (Law), an obituary writer, and Alice (Portman), a carefree (job free) American, are two strangers who notice each other on the street – blush, look down, smile - distantly flirting until she unwittingly walks into traffic. Postponing his commute, he escorts her to the hospital for some waiting room acquainting. Later, on the continued stroll to work, they take detour in an eventually explicative memorial for the passage from introduction to inception.  A relationship is born.
        Skipping a year or so, past the events of the assumed genre, the next scene has Dan meeting Anna (Roberts), a photographer assigned to the jacket of his new novel. In a desperately presumptuous moment, they kiss but she rejects him when his moral unavailability is revealed (Alice now lives with him). Dan grows obsessed, we learn later, and begins to stalk her, but the film skips that year or so too.
         Not that seeing even a montage of omitted time would improve on Patrick Marber’s adaptation of his play - it would in fact weaken it -but the lack of expansion makes the stage evidently more suitable. Easily imagining the removal of all sets and props from the picture without affecting the story gives one an idea of how cinematically deficient is the translation to screen. Actually there are at least two items – computers logged into an uninspired chatroom for casual encounters – necessary to the narrative, but I would prefer them eliminated before anything else. If I want to see this visually stale form of virtual correspondence, I can watch You Got Mail (I don’t and I won’t), its tacky usage of the web at least having cultural and familiar relevance.
         The overlong chat scene results in a sort of meet-awkward between Anna and Dr. Larry (Owens), he duped into thinking she had invited him for free sex and she not dismissing him for being a desperate pervert. Why? My only reasonable answer is that he’s as good looking as Clive Owen just as she eventually forgives Dan’s persistent desperation because, well, he looks like People’s “sexiest man of the year”. The four characters end up forming an Ouroboros of selfish lust and delusions of love. Larry comments on his relationship to Anna as like that of an owner to his dog - he loving her like a possession and she loving him for loving her. But they all confuse love with desperation and they all would be too obvious in their desperation to be loved if they weren’t so gorgeous and if they weren’t so attracted to other desperate, gorgeous people.
        To her credit, Julia Roberts tries to be as humble and plain as possible with the botoxed face of Julia Roberts (first choice for the role was the far less glamorous Cate Blanchett). She gives as good an emotional performance without expression in her forehead. Clive Owen must also be given credit for making his unbelievably sleazy, vindictive and pertinacious character convincing. A sequence halfway through the movie between the two is so riveting that I can almost forget all the surrounding bits featuring the disastrous performance (speaking as if reading lines and crying as if on designated cues) by Natalie Portman.
           Director Mike Nichols has already given cinema an iconic shot of desperation in The Graduate scene where Dustin Hoffman bangs against a church window in an attempt to stop the girl he loves from getting married (also bettering another Roberts vehicle 30 years prior). He even gave life to wicked Neil LaBute-type characters – with the thematically deeper but even more structurally challenged Carnal Knowledge – when LaBute was only 8 years old. Today, one would have to go a lot further to make an impact in this theater of cruelty, though when LaBute tried to outdo his own works’ depravity he gave us the disappointingly forced The Shape of Things. If Nichols only desires a return to more serious adult fare, it must be pointed out that we need Closer no more than we needed What Planet Are You From?  Anyway, nothing could get more adequately serious and adult than his television drama Wit, worth seeing despite its own troubles separating itself from being too dramaturgic.
         The final shots, overwhelmingly ridiculous and redundant rather than revealing, give the film desperation of its own and to accept it with affection (or at least approval) would be to resort to the level of its characters. Were that the goal of Closer, there wouldn’t be the sort of detachment necessary to understand what is wrong with them (us). The film reaffirms, for me and maybe others, a distrust and disinterest in bothering with relationships and - for that small part of us that still gets curious and hopeful -that meet-cutes are the disillusioned thing of fairy tales (and more optimistic movies).

Expectation Key


there's no possible way we will even see this

we'll eventually see this but we aren't really expecting much

anticipating the release of this one but we're sure to be left unsatisfied

such high expectation of this film only leaves room for disappointment