It is as if Nichols is taking vengeance against the typical saccharine Hollywood love story.

Rating: 8/10 (30 January 2005)

Director: Mike Nichols Closer is a mean-spirited, vicious, and ugly love story. Love story? It is as if Mike Nichols has taken the sunny fantasy that is the typical movie love story and turn it inside out, exposing all that is loathsome and sordid in human relationships.
Conversely, the cinematography is stunning and beautiful, and mirrors the claustrophobic boundaries of the plot. It feels as if the camera's landscape is almost exclusively tight-framed shots of the four character's faces. In the way Hitchcock would work within sever, self-imposed restricted landscapes (a lifeboat (Lifeboat), a courtyard (Rear Window)) Nichols self-imposed limitation is his casts' expressions, never venturing far from each face. And it works spectacularly. His cinematic method is mirrored by Julie Roberts' character, Anna's, photographic portrait style. Anna creates tight framed, large-scale portraits of faces in various expressions of pain. And in Closer it seems if you stopped the film from rolling each minute you could extract another gorgeous still portrait from the frame to hang along side Anna's work.
As far as the story, it is a script with boundaries as tight as the cinematography. I cannot think of a line spoken in the film by anyone but the 4 characters involved in these ugly, criss-crossing relationships. It is hard to recall even another human entering a frame of this film. Closer is a nasty, claustrophobic, four-way character study, with each character given equal weight. The four characters, who all meet in various ways and all by chance, betray each other with the others over the course of the film. Jude Law's Dan ends up the most broken character by the film's end, having lost both women to Clive Owen's Larry. Larry, who refers to himself as a simplistic and caveman (both true), comes out on top of the power struggle. Larry is also the most reviled character having destroyed both Anna and Dan by the film's end with his vicious, vengeful control. Anna is the weakest character, referred to a number of times as a coward. Easily manipulated by Larry, Anna succumbs as Larry possession. She is deeply unhappy, but unable to fight against Larry's relentless will.
Portman's Alice is the least damaged by the events in the film, perhaps because of her youth. (Alice is 24 by the end of the film's 4-year time span.) Alice alone is able to escape. In the final scenes Alice frees herself of all emotional ties to Dan and physically escapes back to New York. The final scene showing Alice walking confidently down Time's Square is a powerful image of strength, and more importantly personal reinvention. New York, of course, is the symbol of personal freedom, the city to which countless people have fled to forget the past and emerge a self-invented new person. And if there was ever a situation someone would like to scrub herself clean from, it is the grime of this film. The fact that we find out in the next to last scene that she was living a lie in London under a made up name makes her rebirth in New York all the more complete, and the break from this past all the more clean. Conversely, the three characters that did not escape seem all the more trapped and destroyed.
Uniquely, Nichols has no main character, no sympathetic point of view to serve as a lens into the films. Additionally, the most despicable character, Larry, does not meet his dramatic justice, but instead has assumed power over Anna, and has left Dan damaged and alone. Neither devise is extraordinary in itself; however, such devises are more common in crime films, and Closer, if told traditionally, would be romantic comedy (here, a romantic comedy told with the sensibility of Reservoir Dogs). It is as if Nichols is getting his own vengeance against the typical saccharine, Hollywood love story, showing an amount of sordid darkness equal to the standard amount of romantic sunshine.
At this point I must put Closer to my test for disturbing stories: Is the film's importance, intelligence, artistry, acting (or some other feature) fine enough to justify the horrid subject matter? For my money the answer is yes, and I have surprised myself by the answer. The most compelling reason to see this film is the artistry. The claustrophobic limitations of the story (the four human characters) and cinemagraphic limitations of landscape (the four human faces), the stark, vulnerable performances, all are stunning and worthy of viewing.
Should you see it? Yes, but with the warning of the ugliness found within its fames.