Reversal!

Rating: 5/10 (27 January 2009)

I don't think it's a spoiler to say that you should expect every kind of reversal you can possibly expect out of a love story from this movie. After all, as playwright/screenwriter Patrick Marber "reveals" about 3 minutes into his 105-minute tale, there are only 2 options: s/he loves me, s/he loves me not. He then spends the next 102 minutes playing air hockey against himself, and our tolerance.
The problem here isn't a lack of feeling--oh no, no no. The sets, the acting, the camera-work, are slathered in, dripping with, feeling. Emotion! Drama! Problem is, the feeling is slapped on two-dimensional, implausible characters in situations having no *weight*: realer people make trickier decisions than these day in and year out, and without the arbitrary conveniences of writing. Closer tries to boil all that messy "life" stuff off, and winds up substituting three sudden! reversals for every possible, plausible one it might have turned into a story.
So, grating. By the end, very, very grating. But, but, but: a reason to see this movie *maybe*, especially if you're appropriately foregrated--and I don't wanna overhype this, but it's just true, far more true than anything Marber wrote here--Clive Owen, about 75% of the time the guy's on screen, just *destroys* it. As in, "acts". As in, yeah, THAT is real love.