Exquisite Cruelty.

Rating: 10/10 (22 April 2005)

Mike Nichols must have a thing for dysfunctional quartets, as this is his third entry that tells a story of how four people damage each other with their callousness and emotional immaturity.
With CLOSER he decides not to go loud as in WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? but to misdirect the viewer into thinking he is watching a series of Meet Cutes between the four leads. This is really only the setup for something completely rotten that comes out in a crucial moment, when both Natalie Portman and Clive Owen discover that their spouses, played by Jude Law and Julia Roberts, have been quite shamelessly carrying on and excusing their affair with wordy denials as if that would remedy the situation. To see Portman express total devastation in the fact of infidelity as she asks Law how can he go on with his cheating is to see her innocence and purity of emotions taken away, turned into something that later on becomes ugly and manipulative, although of the four she is the one whom at the end rises above and detaches herself of a damaging relationship.
Owen's descent into conscious perversion is also disturbing. Already apparently heavy into Internet chatting, he is introduced as someone who would innocently chat with what he thinks is a woman and actually believe "she" would meet him later for a quickie, and this gullibility is what also has him believing his wife would not leave him for anyone else even when it's clear she's carrying on with the same person who introduced them. He later decides to hurt them both, and succeeds so, but in trying to tie Roberts to him, he is only cementing the grounds for more mental and emotional cruelty.
Definitely not a date film nor one to watch on Valentine's Day, this is one of those films that takes the notion of love, sets it up on a pedestal, and them hacks away at its limbs and stabs it repeatedly in the heart until there is nothing left but hurt and more hurt and no way out. Ironically, it's physical abuse, never seen throughout the entire film until the very end, that sets at least one character free. Powerful, ugly at times, CLOSER betrays its title and makes you want to remain single for a long time.