A Trenchant Analysis of Tony Blair's Britain - Yeah, Right

Rating: 1/10 (15 August 2005)

Other reviewers here have given good evidence as to why this film is a failure, so I need not go on about it here. I would like to add however, that 'Closer' does show, without any sort of brilliance or depth, just what a bland bore Tony Blair's 'Cool Britannia' has become. Where boring people are content with being snotty and obnoxious and self-centered, and there's really no outstanding reason NOT to be. The emptiness is everywhere. And what are two American women doing in all of this? The story might as well be in Dacron, Ohio. London is as nothing. And Mike Nichols! Once a master director, now, his talents ebbing, attempting to make a hip picture with hipper stars, should have known better. This rubbish, from the man who brought you 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' and 'The Graduate'! Think about retirement, Mike. Every opportunity for making this story into something noteworthy was spitefully thrown away. At least the petulantly 'victorious' so-called dermatologist Clive Owen could have tossed in a scabies or eczema joke or something when he has just reduced delicate Jude Law to tears. And this, in the Land of Monty Python! It almost makes one pine for the Thatcherite days, when at least the Great British spirit of satire was alive and well. Now we have a sort of transatlantic blandness. Yak yak yak, blah blah blah. So I have to assume that the cast and crew thought they were making some sort of intellectual statement, either via a modern existentialism, or via a much baser technique: by bludgeoning the audience softly with just plain boring and uninteresting empty characters. If they wanted to dabble in this sort of water, they could have at least done a viewing of Peter Greenaway's masterpiece, 'The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover'. But boring is safer and does not require so much depth or imagination.