Closer or Further Apart

Rating: 5/10 (27 April 2009)

When Closer was released a couple of years ago, I watched it because of its full star cast. It was a difficult one for me. Years later, I watched it for a second time. This time, I did not understand it any better than I did years ago.
Is Closer a deep movie that explores love and relationship or is it a piece of work that simply pretends to be deep? My answer is both. However, I doubt that I might be far away from being right since the work is either too profound or too good at pretending to be profound for me to understand.
Love is the eternal theme of art. Loving relationship mixing with betrayal, lies, sex, revenge and anger is beyond full exploration and pure analysis. Thus Closer as a piece of work that tries to reflect love in reality is undoubtedly a deep one, yet it is impossible to fully reflect the complicity of loving relationship in two hours, and thus it can only be pretending to be deep.
The four main characters depicted in the film come from different backgrounds and hold different understandings of love, yet I think they share one thing in common, which is that they are strangers to others. They might be close as lovers or wife and husband, yet they hardly know their partners and even themselves. Truth and lies intervene. Does love offer enough courage to face betrayals and enough support to defeat them? Probably not.
Larry loves in an almost crucially honest way. He confesses his adultery in New York and demands to know every dirty detail from his wife of her adultery with Dan. He seeks joy of revenge by crashing down Dan's dream of pure love with both Anna and Alice. On the other hand, Dan constantly falls in love at the first sight. He leaves Alice for Anna, he walks away on Anna then for her "final" sex with Larry, and he comes to Alice after all the buzz. He did all them because he thinks he was pursuing love. For me, he is the one who is truly pathetic. While he is busy chasing his dream as writer and his dream of perfect pure love, he can only be disappointed again and again. When he looks at the mirror in the hotel and steps outside the elevator to tell Alice he loves her despite her relationship with Larry, it is the moment of love. Ironically, it comes after his talk with Larry, and he comes to Larry, in the first place, to highlight his love for Anna and blame Larry for sabotage their romantic relationship.
Which one is closer, your loving partner whom you think you know or a stranger that you immediately fall in love at the first sight? I do not know. Perhaps you should watch it and tell me about it. However, you may find it not worthy of time.