Cavemen in Kenneth Coles and the women who love them

Rating: 1/10 (5 July 2005)

Take two ur-neurotic Brit yuppies, offer no indication as to why they are so squirrelly, and tie them with women who are more or less cyphers, and you have the basis for "Closer." Get some terrific actors to play them, and you've got a hit on your hands. That box office popularity is something I can't understand. I suffered through this film--and at $10 a pop the suffering was excruciating --because I think nobody in life--NOBODY--is as shallow as are these four. If they were being menaced by a werewolf, I could understand it. Prey do not need their characters developed. But these four (okay, maybe the Julia Roberts character is two-dimensional) are so tissue thin that I stopped caring about them in the first 10 minutes. Yes, there are some powerful individual scenes--and several with Natalie Portman are remarkably vibrant--but these don't add up to a movie, any more than a series of quirky monologues add up to a play.