***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, and Clive Owen
Directed by Mike Nichols & written by Patrick Marber, from his play
2004
104 min R
What lesson do we learn from “Closer?” Well, the lesson that I learned is that you do not fuck with Clive Owen. Period. Maybe we already knew that from “Croupier,” “Gosford Park,” and “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” but “Closer” makes it abundantly clear that you should not even cross him anonymously on the internet. Because he will destroy you. Even if it takes years and involves marrying a woman he doesn’t really care about, you’re done for.
This is my lasting impression of “Closer:” a ruthless, remorseless, demonic, sarcastic, and incredible performance by a man who has made a career out of being smoldering, expressionless, and looking through you as if you weren’t there. I watched “Closer” with my wife and I doubt my marriage has ever been so threatened. Because even as Clive behaves in ways that would fill Iago with envy, we couldn’t help admiring him. He was far and away the coolest of the movie’s four characters. We wouldn’t want to know him personally, but we’re glad to know OF him. As for the rest of the film, I suppose it has a point to make but, really, if you convinced me that it totally succeeded or completely failed at whatever it set out to do, my overall opinion wouldn’t change that much. Clive is still the villain of the year, or at least tied with David Carradine.
The basic thrust of “Closer” seems built out of the fairy tale or legend about the traveller who comes across two talking whatevers; one of the talking whatevers can only lie and the other can only tell the truth. The legend was played on “Star Trek” as a way to confuse robots and it popped up in the David Bowie/Jennifer Connelly flick “Labyrinth” in the form of talking door knockers. Out of the four adulterers in “Closer,” two appear to more-or-less be normal human beings, but one is virtually incapable of lying, while another is virtually incapable of telling the truth. And, as is often the case in life but not in fiction, the liar is the comforter, while the truth-teller comes across as monstrous. When we see the two extremes in conversation, it has the eerie quality of two computer programs trapped in a loop, each automaton unable to actually reach the other.
The setting is present day London. Dan (Jude Law) is an aspiring author, paying the bills by writing obituaries. He meets Alice (Natalie Portman), an exotic dancer from America, and they fall in love. Jump ahead to the impending publication of Dan’s novel when he meets and falls in love with a photographer named Anna (Julia Roberts) in the span of a few minutes, while Alice is waiting outside. Anna rejects Dan, but not very sincerely, and as payback, Dan sends a pervert he meets in a chatroom to meet Anna as if she had set up a date with him for anonymous sex. The pervert is a dermotologist named Larry (Clive Owen) and, after the initially awkwardness of discovering that Anna is not the woman he thought she would be, they actually hit it off. The internet exchange between Dan and Larry is one of the funniest scenes this year. But Dan has not forgotten his feelings for Anna, and neither has she.
Patrick Marber wrote “Closer” and based it on his play of the same name. The movie feels like a play in all ways except the one you’re thinking about: it doesn’t feel stagey or clunky. The director is Mike Nichols, who won the Oscar in 1967 for a little film of which you may have heard called “The Graduate.” A veteran of both stage and film, he understands them both and does not turn movies into a second-rate imitation or advertisement for the stage, the way some adaptations feel so in awe of the book or the play that they don’t even try to seem self-contained. Suffice it to say, Nichols does not simply point his camera at a scene and then leave it there, but weaves us in and out with the currents of conversation.
But it’s also refreshing that he does not try to cover up “Closer’s” origins in the theatre. Nichols sets up the ground rules and we accept that “Closer” will still follow the rules of modern theatre even if we don’t have to suffer the stiltedness of a stationary viewpoint. The characters are more lucid and possess a larger vocabulary than anyone you or I know. They live in a closed universe without tertiary acquaintances or interests besides the ones that so sharply define them. To wit: the stripper is in many ways just a fantasy for the men to put their stories on, the writer is the romantic, the doctor is the realist, and the photographer is obsessed with truth and not being happy. All of their conversations could pretty much take place in any place or no place; we can almost see the black void of a minimalist stage production. Years go by without the characters aging or changing wardrobe. Clear “hints” are made early in each scene to give us an idea of how many weeks, months, or years have elapsed since the last scene. But there is no cinematic indication of the passage of time, no high-speed sunrise-sunset, no changing of the seasons, no montage of the couples together at home.
Rarely do the movies make love out to be the hard, often tedious work that it really is. Will you enjoy “Closer?” I dunno, probably not. None of the characters is likeable in the traditional sense, in that we want to admit to doing or feeling any of the ways any of them do. Dan is a selfish man-child, the depths of Alice’s coyness are revealed in the last couple of scenes, Anna is genetically unfaithful, and, unless you find yourself admiring the purity of Larry’s villainy, you’ll just denounce him as a scumbag. But Clive is quite the scumbag. It’s down to him and Morgan Freeman for this year’s supporting actor Oscar. Freeman is natural while Clive, as befits the material, is heightened. I’d be happy to see either of them win. It would be ridiculous for Freeman to go through life without winning an Oscar, and, all other things being equal, Owen gives the best performance of all the nominees. At least I can say “I liked him before he was popular.”
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
Finished Wednesday, February 16, 2005
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