The ugliness we don't want to want

Rating: 9/10 (11 February 2015)

Mike Nichols' Closer is a rough blow to any soul who considers themselves a hopeless romantic or somebody who believes in unconditional, true love at first sight. Having recently been involved in an incredibly open, romantic friendship that had me caught under love's uncompromising spell only to be slammed down by hardened reality and poor circumstance, Nichols' film is just the kind of bitter but brutally honest work on the subject I needed. Here is a film that recognizes the human desire for truth and honesty, and the simultaneous closure and pain it can provide, whilst examining, paradoxically, how much pain and suffering true love can leave someone.
The film opens in London, with two strangers, Alice Ayres (Natalie Portman) and Dan Woolf (Jude Law), catching each others eyes on a crowded street before Alice is unexpectedly hit by a taxi in the crosswalk. Dan takes her to the hospital, where she remains stable and discharged soon after, and the two strike up a companionship obviously destined for some kind of romantic relationship along the line. She is an American woman who worked as a stripper before coming to live in London, and he's a failed British author who now writes obituaries for a London-based newspaper.
A year later, though Alice and Dan are in a relationship, Dan begins to minimize his loyalty by flirting and sharing a kiss with an American photographer named Anna Cameron (Julia Roberts), who is photographing him for his upcoming novel on Alice's life. When Anna comes over one day to photograph Alice, Dan secretly asks Anna to have an affair with him, to which she refuses. Alice overhears the conversation but pretends like she didn't, even as she notices Dan stalking Anna for the next year. One day, Dan posing as Anna in a cybersex chatroom manages to match her up with Larry Gray (Clive Owen), a British dermatologist, by convincing him to meet her at an aquarium, a place where Anna is known to go. The two meet, realize they were played, presume it was by Dan, and go on to lead a romantic relationship; Dan hopes this will deter his feelings for Anna and rekindle contentment with Alice, but alas, it only makes him more jealous of Anna.
Closer concerns the kind of deception and deceit that comes into play when the characters begin meeting and interacting with one another. Eventually, Larry meets Alice, and Dan meets Larry, resulting in several different relationships brewing on many different levels of hostility and contempt. The characters are only seen in the same room once, as Nichols and writer Patrick Marber, who penned the play the film is based on, allow each individual relationship to take on its own level of singularity rather than lumping the characters together in one gigantic scene.
Holding the film together are the performances of the actors at hand, each capitalizing off of a sole trait that makes them interesting and believably flawed. Alice, despite working as a stripper and willing to do pretty much anything for anyone, still radiates a childlike sense of whimsy and innocence, often playing like she doesn't know the entirety of what's occurring before her. Dan is restless, never settling down and always looking for something better, whilst, in the process, ruins the lives of the three other characters in the film. Anna has a neediness to her; a neediness to be loved and cared for, similar to Alice, that makes her not pitiable but relatable on a human level, mimicking our very desire to be appreciated and cherished. Finally, there's Larry, who replicates methods by using either blunt force, hungering for the truth in a more brash, vulgar manner than Dan, all while trying to remain civil even in the most unsavory circumstances.
Consider the scene where Larry demands to know what Anna sees in Dan, particularly their love-making and how it is different or similar to their own intimacy. At first, Anna refrains from graphic details, but soon plays Larry's game of brutal honest, dishing out the details that he simultaneously does and doesn't want to know. This part hits close to home for me; while I want to know the details of things, I often wish I hadn't and dwell upon them for a considerable amount of time. Nichols and Marber question of whether or not it's better to know and dwell, for at least you have the knowledge of the situation, or be blissfully ignorant of the acts of your significant other and operate with a comforting sense of tunnel vision.
At its core, however, this is an incredibly upsetting film, especially for those who like their films about love romantic and picturesque. Those who enjoy romance films treating love as a fallacy and akin to the kind of pretty pictures on post-cards shouldn't even bother picking this one up, unless they want to see any form of concrete reality. Closer may not be pretty, but it's brutally honest, and emphasizes the paradox of love's pleasure and pain, and works best if you know such feelings and what they can bring to a person. This is an incredibly underrated, compelling adult drama, cleanly executing character investment and motivations on top of etching in under-explored ideas about a topic that is heavily explored.