Well made but misguided version of the play

Rating: 6/10 (12 December 2004)

A few years back I saw the play of Closer on stage and while I wasn't truly in love with it, it had stayed with me during all of the intervening time. There's been talk of turning it into a movie since before the Broadway run, and finally with Mike Nichols at the helm it arrives on movie screens.
How is it? A well acted, well written mess that suffers for the changing. Bouncing through time the story tells of the coupling, uncoupling, re-coupling and uncoupling of four people who try as they might not to abuse the hell out of each other.
What worked on stage doesn't here. Conversations that took place in one place over a brief period of time are opened up and seem to stretch through various locations and so seem to be artificial, or having been staged by a director who was afraid to make a talking head picture.
Natalie Portman's character seems to have been reinvented and for the most is not the disaster I had feared. I do question her constant smoking since it seems to have been put front and center as a means of making her seem older (or closer to her actual 20 something age) than the 15 years of her looks.
There are several changes to the source material, in particular at the end where the fate of one character is completely different, and the stunning ending of the play is muted.
I know I should not be comparing the play to the movie since they are ultimately different, but the only way to express why the film didn't work for me is to compare the two. I had given up any real hope that the film was going to be the play early and so took the film on its own terms and found it wanting. It just doesn't work on its own terms except fleetingly.
The performances are first rate and as a series of unconnected scenes this is dynamite, but nothing hangs together. Its as if Mike Nichols had several very fine pieces of cloth but couldn't bring them together as anything that looked like the quilt he had in mind.
See it or don't, I don't know what else to say since its such an almost film it may click with you or it may grate on you, the choice is yours.