Unknown Pleasures

Rating: Null/10 (15 February 2005)

Here we have a house built of sexual envy, unfettered passion, deception, longing, betrayal, hatred . . . insert your own cliché. But in bringing these bricks to the building site, writer Patrick Marber has forgotten one crucial thing . . . his architectural drawing. In other words, Closer is a rickety edifice permanently on the point of collapse.
Marber is not helped in his task by two of the most woeful pieces of miscasting in mainstream cinema history. Yes, I'm talking about the two 'big names'.
Jude Law is execrable as newspaper obituary writer Dan. His character is supposed to be enigmatic, artistic, a romantic. What we actually get is an utterly unbelievable, two-dimensional fallacy. At no point does the viewer engage with his persona, such as it is. One never feels sympathy, empathy or even antipathy, simply a numb disbelief that he is here at all. Law is not just wooden, he's cardboard.
And if he's cardboard, Julia Roberts playing Anna (a kind of glammier Annie Leibovitz transplanted to London) is overstretched rubber. As a femme fatale, she makes a great candlestick. For her, acting is a business; a by-numbers routine in which the only digits she seems to care about are the ones on her pay cheque.
So, half the main cast might just as well not have turned up. Which is a shame, because the other two have something of the superb about them. Natalie Portman as the stripper Alice is more than mere eye candy; she has a naturalness seldom seen on the big screen (even if the lap dancing scenes jar).
But far and away the best performance comes from Clive Owen. It is in his character, Larry, that Marber comes closest to achieving his goal of bridging the gap between entertainment and philosophical contemplation. Larry is a feral, animalistic, dermatologist for whom love is really only skin deep. Through his predilections and tastes, he proves that as a species, we are deluding ourselves if we think human beings are anything more than a series of sensation-seeking interconnected orifices.
If anything, Owen is too good for this film. We are meant to be appalled by him, to be repulsed by his base desires. But it is such a relief when he is on screen, that all his character's sins are forgiven.