Old, familiar ground.

Rating: 3/10 (5 December 2004)

Mike Nichols clearly felt that it was time to remind people that relationships between men and women are still sadistic affairs. Based on a stage play, his new film *Closer* goes back to the halcyon days of the director's own *Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?* and especially *Carnal Knowledge*. The results are not quite as bracing, though credit must be given to any director who dares to ATTEMPT to discuss sexual relationships with honesty. Watching *Closer* reveals just how much Hollywood has babied us recently, with one schoolgirl's romantic fantasy following upon another. Indeed, at the showing I attended, three ladies in front of me got up and left during the scene early on when Jude Law (posing as a girl) and Clive Owen engage in dirty chat on the Internet. "Definitely NOT what I expected," one of the women murmured as they rose to leave. Those expecting a chick-flick are well warned to save your important dollars.
However, let me also warn away cineastes expecting challenging cinema. *Closer* treads upon well-worn paths, paths not merely blazed by this director. Bottom line? If you're familiar with the two Nichols films mentioned above, *L'Avventura* and *La Notte* by Antonioni, *La Dolce Vita* by Fellini, *Hiroshima, Mon Amour* by Resnais, and even *Eyes Wide Shut* by Kubrick, and on and on and on, *Closer* will be something of a chore to sit through. It's the curse of being an experienced movie-watcher:
one's patience wears thinner and thinner when presented with familiar material, no matter how potentially explosive that material might be.
The movie is a negative chamber-drama that shows us the basic incompatibility of men and women. Two British men in London meet two American women -- basically by accident -- and fall in love with them. Utilizing a curious (and pretty successful) narrative structure that skips over lengthy gaps of time in order to jump to the next crisis, Nichols orchestrates a series of infidelities, recriminations, soul-baring monologues reminiscent of Mamet, and escalating power-plays in a game of sexual one-upsmanship. Jude Law abandons Natalie Portman for Julia Roberts, who is married to Clive Owen, who in turn goes after Natalie Portman, who . . . you get the idea. In order to avoid making all of this seem like a commedia dell'arte farce, Nichols makes sure that all of the potty-mouth dialog from the play remains intact in the movie. What makes it High Drama, presumably, is that they tend to either shout or weep when declaiming their urbane obscenities.
All in all, I believe that Nichols isn't "re-making" his older films so much as he's responding to Stanley Kubrick's final film. In *Eyes Wide Shut*, Kubrick thought he could blow the lid off sex for a mainstream audience by presenting it with two Hollywood Superstars and showing the actual sex in a baroque, explicit manner -- but his dialog was its usual clinical, Kubrickian self: dry as dust. Nichols, with the same goal in mind, tries to achieve it in the direct reverse of Kubrick: not a single sex scene, but with oodles and oodles of graphic sex chat. The result is much the same: mannered and pretentious. Maybe this is because the Sexual Revolution happened 40 years ago, and the purveyors of this sort of material need to be of the New Generation: artists like Neil LaBute and Todd Solondz, artists who do not remember the old sexual repression and thus have a more modern, relevant take on today's sexual mores.
Nichols' direction is unobtrusive, as expected, which allows us to focus on the characters . . . but even so, the script is overly dependent on the individual actors to carry a sense of identity across. The two successful ones in this regard are clearly Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, perhaps because they're a bit older, a bit less pretty, and a bit world-wearier. Owen, who appears to have actually originated Jude Law's character on the London stage, tears into the part of Larry like a wolf going after a raw cutlet. Owen strides across the screen in a fury, revealing a nastiness that was not evident to us before. His Larry, with his addiction to pornography, whores, and strip clubs, is an angry misogynist and incipient rapist straight out of the LaBute pantheon. This guy could be the love-child of Jack Nicholson from *Carnal Knowledge*. The biggest SURPRISE would have to be Julia Roberts' portrayal of Anna, the woman whom Larry eventually marries. Nichols absolutely reins in Roberts -- she doesn't flash that megawatt smile even once. It's a depressed, shrinking, cringing role that requires the world's most famous actress to totally sublimate her considerable ego. Roberts pulls it off. Perhaps the fact that she's pushing 40 -- no longer the "pretty woman" -- helped in this regard. As for Law and Portman: Law doesn't quite break through as Dan, though I regard this as the fault of the character as written. Law can be brilliant, but he needs a strongly written role (for instance, he made a curiously stronger impact in *I Heart Huckabees* -- a mediocre movie, but Law's role was a cinch). Portman is in over her ahead amongst all the adults, and it certainly doesn't help that her character is that most laughable of clichÃ©s currently favored by recent male writers: the Sensitive Stripper.
*Closer* gets 3 stars out of 10 for the initiated; perhaps up to 5 for the novices.