Oh What Wretched Characters

Rating: 2/10 (4 November 2009)

Unnecessarily tangled romantic relationships among four beautiful people in modern London form the core of this Mike Nichols directed film, based on a play. About the only thing I liked here was the melancholy song "The Blower's Daughter", sung by Damien Rice, that opens the film. The film's script is wretched.
Selfish, self-absorbed, obsessed with sex, vindictive, and shallow are how I would describe the four main characters, people who are annoyingly photogenic and "hip". The dialogue is like an interrogation session, with characters asking prying, intimate questions, over and over. These characters don't talk like real people. They emote, as if their words came straight from a screenplay, which makes the story seem ... fake. The dialogue is so contrived, so expedient to the plot, that I couldn't take any of these vain people, or their drama, seriously.
The film's action trends static. Characterization and dialogue are what count here, the back and forth banter that describes these miserable people.
Casting is terrible. I would have had more respect for this film if the four beautiful people had been played by less well-known actors. All four of the A-list actors here ... pose. They convey the impression that the film is about their performances, their careers.
Visuals are acceptable, if unremarkable. The highbrow, artsy music is fine, except that it amplifies an overall sense of pretentiousness.
With such unlikeable characters and with dialogue that is super, super contrived, this film left me bored and eager for it to end. Mike Nichols used to be a really fine director. "Closer" is not one of his better films.