Emotionally harsh, but honest, very well performed

Rating: 7/10 (19 September 2009)

"Closer" is a quite interesting and well made transposition of a piece of drama: it is not easy to pass from the stage to the screen, but here Mike Nichols did a good job in keeping the theatrical quality throughout the movie: the four characters are deeply characterized, dialogues incisive, articulate, scenes are often evocative and never too explicit.
Four attractive and talented actors (even Julia Roberts, who does not often convince me in other movies) move on the stage of a quite unrecognizable modern London and play the game of love with uneasiness, too self-confidence, cynicism, but never reaching a true consciousness about love, exchanging it for desire, desiring the other when they are not with him/her, and then being incapable of staying with him/her, when it's time to prove with action the love they so easily profess with words. It is very harsh in the way people deceive, then repent, tell the truth, ask for forgiveness, deceive again in a never ending wheel of truth and deceit that in the end seems unbearable and we need Alice's going back to New York as the only interruption of this intolerable and pointless game.
In the end, we are unable to understand who loves who, and, of course we do not feel very comforted when we realize how this elusiveness of love adheres to real life, when we also have to, and sometimes cannot understand, if we are really in love, or we love the idea of love, or of being in love. What I appreciated is the honesty in portraying the mutability of true sentiment, in confused and complicated situations where both men and women show their best and worst, and cannot take a resolute step towards happiness, probably because, as it is said in the movie, people sometimes do not want to be happy, do not accept the stability of true affection, and prefer uncertainty to safety.
As I said before, all the four actors offer talented performances: Jude Law is superb, Clive Owen very good (although it is so difficult to sympathize with him), Natalie Portman as the the fragile girl and Julia Roberts as the cold always feeling guilty woman render the complexity of their emotional inner world in a very convincing way.