Quadrangles are more fun

Rating: 8/10 (22 December 2005)

(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon.)
Okay, let's get something straight right away. If you cheat on your partner, you do NOT tell. In fact, if you are asked about who you slept with in the past, you do not tell. Even in junior high school you learned, you do not kiss and tell.
Cheating is the big lie. This movie is about cheating and lying. People cheat. They get tempted. They want excitement. People are animals. But it is worse than adding insult to injury if you cheat and tell. Don't cheat. But if you do, don't tell.
This is a clever--although I wouldn't call it slick--film about how attractive people of a certain age and milieu are always hitting on and being hit upon. It is about the shallowness of love and the urgency of sex. It is about pretty people on the screen fulfilling fantasies. The dialogue is hip, sharp, although sometimes too cute and superficial.
It is stylish and ephemeral. It has the facade of realism. Note that none of the characters have children and none of them are trying to save the world. They are sexual and emotional hedonists, and maybe they are saying something about our times, in the big cities of the Western world at the dawn of the new millennium. On the other hand, they are urban professionals, skillfully navigating their way through the urban jungle toward a life of fulfillment and meaning... Well, maybe not.
But the emotions that the characters experience are very real. When you love someone and that someone sleeps with your rival, it is very painful. And when you love someone and you find that that someone doesn't love you, it is very painful. But the psychological pain that is visited upon us at such times is also ephemeral and will pass.
If you live on a farm in the middle of Nebraska, Jude Law is not going to kiss you and tempt you into cheating on your husband even if you are as pretty as Julia Roberts. If you really are a plain Jane without style or looks, Clive Owen is going to pass you by as you sit in the aquarium. He'll study the fish. So this is really about Hollywood itself (although set in London) and the usual musical beds. This is TV's "Friends" in the raw. This is Mike Nichols updating Carnal Knowledge, his very sixties-ish quadrangle film released in 1971 starring Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel, Ann-Margret and Candice Bergen. As in Carnal Knowledge--and, by the way, in Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (made into a film starring Juliette Binoche)--there are four attractive, sexually active people who can't keep their hands off of one another. If you liked triangles, you randy geometricians, you'll really love quads, seems to be the thinking here.
Well, I did kind of like this film. What's not to like about Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Jude Law and Clive Owen? They are attractive and they are talented. The script from Patrick Marber adapting his play of the same name (with some very real influence from Milan Kundera's novel: note that in both cases there is a doctor and one of the women is in the sexual professions and the other is either a photographer or a painter) is witty and, yes, sexy. The direction by Mike Nichols (now in his seventies) is a little uneven and sometimes cryptic, especially as regards the ending and the beginning. (Never mind. I would like to discuss the ending, but, alas, that might spoil the film for somebody. As for the "Boy Meets Girl, Cute" beginning...well, it was VERY familiar.) But the film is crisply edited and there are no dead spots. You will be entertained, even if you later feel that you got seduced yourself and feel like you just ate a whole box of sugary bon-bons.
Irony: while Natalie Portman plays the lower-class stripper, in real life she is (or was) working toward a medical degree at Harvard.
And yes, Alice always lies and Larry always tells the truth...well, almost. Alice's character is very complex, but not entirely realized in the film. We are too much distracted by the sexcapades and the other personalities to see her as clearly as we might. Portman does a good job in a challenging role. There is something almost pathological about Alice that Portman conveys with modulated swings in mood and expression. Larry, the doc, is, as he tells us, the caveman, while Dan is the emotional pretty boy. And Anna...well, Anna is smart and has a deeper appreciation than the other characters of who she is and what she wants. And she does manage to get what she wants.
See this for Mike Nichols whose credits include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), The Graduate (1967), Silkwood (1983), Postcards from the Edge (1990), and a number of other very successful films. In Closer, he shows once again that he still knows what interests the current generation.