Sleek, Fun, High-Minded Sex-Head Games

Rating: 7/10 (27 December 2004)

I very much enjoyed this movie and want to recommend it to viewers seeking a quality film.
Having said that, I don't so much recommend it for how it is marketing itself -- as a deep, risk-taking movie that has the courage to speak edgey truths about men, women, sex, and love.
Rather, I want to recommend it as a sleek, witty, well-made movie that puts four of the most supernaturally beautiful people alive today: Clive Owen, Jude Law, Julia Roberts and Natalie Portman, up on screen in one sexually provocative situation after another.
Yum.
The movie is intellectually and aesthetically above almost everything else in mainstream cinemas as I write this, winter 2004.
It's tighter, better constructed, and more economical than the narrative mess of the Howard Hughes biopic "Aviator." It's funnier than "Meet the Fockers." After all, the director is Mike Nichols, who gave us "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
There are all sorts of gestures that an earnest English Major plunging, for the first time, into the mysteries of symbolism will pounce upon: one of the characters is a stripper who refuses to reveal herself even while stripping; one of the characters is a dermatologist -- a literal skin doctor -- a key scene of flirtation and seduction takes place -- oh, come on now -- in front of a tank full of man-eating sharks.
Add another main character who is a photographer who has dedicated herself to photographing strangers and a writer who "steals" the lifestory of his lover and you've got a full night of discussion over coffee and cigarettes.
In scene after scene, the outside world disappears -- this movie could have taken place almost anywhere, at anytime, it is so divorced from the surrounding world, and so focused on the bedroom problems of its main characters -- and the four beautiful protagonists are tormented by love, by yearning, by their partner's infidelity, by the physical attractiveness of people they cannot have, or should not have, by jealousy, by their partner's game playing -- really, it's an Olympic Decathalon of "things that can go wrong when in love and lust."
And the performances are first rate. Jude Law uses his beauty wonderfully to convey a man with more sensitivity than strength; Clive Owen uses his very different masculine beauty and intensity to portray a self-styled "caveman" with working class roots. Natalie Portman is terrific as a sensitive and yet savvy streetwise "waif."
Is "Closer" as deep as it thinks it is? Or is it just about getting to see Jude Law kiss Julia Roberts kiss Clive Owen kiss Natalie Portman? In bathrobes, stripper costumes, thong underwear? Well, look at it this way: suppose Amanda Plummer, Rhea Perlman, Paul Giamatti, and Jason Alexander were the leads? With the same script? I don't think so.
Really, I liked this movie. I liked seeing these beautiful people play very wittily written sex-head games with each other for a couple of hours.
I didn't, though, think that this movie was the equal of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" or "Night of the Iguana" or many another talky, character-focused movie that really did make me think twice about men, women, love, fidelity, sex, and yearning.
I still think it is one of the most worth seeing movie out there right now.