A Fascinating Adult Trip into Life...

Rating: Null/10 (13 December 2004)

I saw Closer when it opened here and was not expecting a beautiful time with it. Having been a fan of the stage play and seeing the cast I was not flat out pleased. However, the one thing that I liked was Mike Nichols.
He is a brilliant director who has proved he can adapt anything or create anything into art. So the next good thing about this piece was using Patrick Marber (the playwright) to adapt his own play (ala Tony Kushner adapting Angels in America [another brilliant play adaptation]).
So I sat down and began to relax...
The title came up and a song began to play and I was plunged into the most fascinating movie on adult topics, with adult speech and adult emotions that I can ever think of. This was a brilliant piece of art.
I must say that the love square: Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Jude Law, and Natalie Portman were astounding in their scenes together, functioning opposite each other. And Julia and Jude Law seem to have more experience on film but the real standouts were Clive Owen and Natalie Portman.
Clive Owen has been constantly good and a brilliant actor in his work thus far in his career, but gives the performance of his life in this. I hear the Oscar bells ringing.
Natalie Portman has always been my guilty pleasure even in the Star Wars movies and between her performance in this and Garden State, I will be disappointed if she doesn't at least get an Academy Award nomination.
Again, it was a beautiful movie for the 18 and up age range just based off of emotional content and adult situations.
***** A+++