Lar and Anna and Dan and Alice

Rating: 10/10 (1 January 2005)

Mike Nichols is one of my favorite directors, a multi-talented genius who has never been afraid to work on the edge (quite possibly he cannot work any other way), and when he delves into the intense Scorpionic waters of the savagery involved in the vast majority of one-on-one relationships, you know a profound experience is in store.
With Closer, he returns to the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf format of 4 people brutally ravaging one another's psyches. Closer is different though, of course, because it takes place over a period of time rather than a consecutive amount of days, as Woolf did, and it's a much better film, I believe: over the years, Nichols has managed to hone his innate Scorpio talent of restraint, and Closer benefits from this magnificently. Like Virginia Woolf, it's based on a play, and it does feel stagy, but this works FOR the film - the framework of one scenario after the other in which time has passed (or regressed, as the case may be; the film is not entirely linear, which is another brilliant choice) creates the discipline - the illusion of civility - necessary to exhibit the brutal mind games and lethal, obsessive ego-driven powerplays that endlessly occur between the 4 characters.
I realized over dinner after seeing it last night (my last film of 2004!) that Closer is basically an s&m film, without one whip or chain ever appearing, and it's an unbelievably violent film, without one head rolling across the screen and without the male characters resorting to duking it out in the streets a la Bridget Jones. I also appreciated how ONLY the 4 characters have speaking parts in the movie, and how all 4 are very articulate and somewhat self-aware: they sort of know why they're doing what they're doing, they do understand themselves on some level, but they're still helpless to stop their behavior because their egos are involved, particularly with the 2 men.
What they don't understand - or want to understand - is the meaning of 'truth', which is essentially a 5th character in the movie: 'truth' is used as a blunt instrument by all 4 of the characters, and ironically, when one of them actually TELLS the truth in a non-hurtful way (it's Alice, who admits to Larry at one point that her real name is Jane) she is of course not believed. At the heart of this is the sad truth that most of the time, whenever anyone tries to get closer to anybody else, whether the attempt is sincere or otherwise, he or she eventually comes to understand that most people cannot deal with the truth, do not want to hear it and certainly not from someone they're intimately involved with, even if that person is sincere and not using 'truth' as a weapon, and so all relationships wind up being untruthful in one way or another.
Law's Daniel commits what I think is the most mean-spirited act in the film, by chatting with Owen's Larry in an internet sex room (in one of the edgiest scenes in the film or rather it's tied with the scene in the strip club between Larry and Natalie Portman's Alice aka Jane - too provocative to even begin to describe, where the power shifts back and forth like in an especially well-matched chess game). In the chat room scene, Dan poses as Anna (Julia Roberts, who has never looked more human or been presented more effectively as seen through fellow-Scorpio Nichols' probing lens), but then he takes the chat one step further by telling Larry to meet 'her' at the aquarium, where he knows Anna goes all the time. Larry goes and Anna's there and Larry makes a major fool of himself, and he doesn't forget it - he gets his revenge indirectly through Anna and then directly, in the film's most brutal verbal confrontation between him and Daniel, later on.
It also wasn't lost on this viewer how ironic the characters' professions in the film are: Anna is a photographer - she takes pictures of strangers, hoping to show their humanity but in reality she's using them because she doesn't really seem to be learning anything from her work. Alice is a stripper, which she digs because of the obvious power trip involved. Dan is a writer of obituaries by day and a fiction writer the rest of the time - he admits early on to Alice that his obits are all resplendent with euphemisms (i.e.: "'he enjoyed his privacy' means he was a raving queen", like that), and his fiction is apparently sex-driven accounts of his relationships; he's in essence using his partners as fodder for said fiction. Larry is a doctor, specifically a dermatologist: skin - superficial layers that get deeper as they are revealed. He has one of the best lines in the piece, which occurs during the final confrontation between the men, where Dan is whining about 'the heart' and Larry shoots back, "have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist covered in blood", words to that effect - not the most subtle imagery, but in context it speaks volumes.
My IMDb rating: 10 (****)