Up close and impersonal...

Rating: 2/10 (21 December 2004)

CLOSER has the makings of your typical romantic comedy: A contrived change-partners-and-romance plot; love-at-first-sight meet-cute situations; glamorously superficial characters played by superficially glamorous actors; manipulative schemes to seduce and/or abandon lovers; and glib, archly self-satisfied dialogue. The film offers up nothing that hasn't been done hundreds, if not thousands, of times in hundreds, if not thousands, of movies and sitcoms. Indeed, it has everything you would want in a romantic comedy, except for two things: romance and comedy.
Dark and brooding, CLOSER is one of those insufferably smug exercises in droning pomposity that truly thinks it is delivering a pious sermon of Truth and Honesty about Relationships -- though the word used in the movie isn't "relationships," but a less polite one that begins with the letter "f." The use of profanity -- the f-word being just one of many bandied about in the film with casual contempt -- is meant to punctuate just how Truthful and Honest the characters/filmmakers are. It is also an indication of just how lazy and/or pretentious the writer is.
The basic storyline is trite, but admittedly dependable: She (Natalie Portman) loves he (Jude Law), who falls in love with her (Julia Roberts), who is attracted to him (Clive Owen) -- though everybody plays musical beds -- until, in the best of all possible soap operas fashion, everybody ends up (or doesn't end up) with the right person. But in CLOSER, who ends up with who is irrelevant, since the characters are so truly petty, self-centered and deceitful, it is impossible to care if any of them live happily ever after. Maybe that is screenwriters Patrick Marber's point: Lovers and liars are synonymous words -- unselfish love is a contradiction of terms. Such cynicism is nothing new in movies like this, but usually it is eased down with a bittersweet coat of humanity, if not humor. Marber revels in the bitter, but denies the sweet: The characters have to keep telling us just how madly in love they are with each other since the film supplies them with precious little screen time to actually show it. Any display of love, kindness or even respect between any given couple is merely a preamble to an act of betrayal or rejection or revenge.
While enduring the movie, one can amuse oneself trying to figure out the point of the title, which seems to be a misnomer since no character really ever gets particularly close to another before they begin to push each other away. I assume the title refers to the way that the story condenses time into bite-sized pieces, revealing the film's roots as a multi-act play. Since the story takes place over a period of four or five years, the characters keep having to announce that a year has past between scenes to explain gaps in the story's logic. And repeatedly segments of the film begin with characters announcing their undying passion and ending with them angrily breaking up, squeezing days or weeks of reality into a few minutes of unconvincing, heightened melodrama. Such artificial manipulation of time is understandable in a play, but unnecessary and irritating in a film which pretends to take place in the real world. It is possible that director Mike Nichols was purposely trying to mislead the audience about the timing of events in order to make a point, but what that point might be is unclear.
To give them credit, the actors do what they can with so little to work with. Their characters are one-dimensional at best and clichÃ©d at worst. (Marber's idea of originality is making Portman's waif-like character a stripper, rather than a prostitute. Wow, how daring!) At least Roberts endows her character with a consistent tone, albeit one of somber self-absorption; I guess there is a certain triumph for her in being able to suppress under a cloud of chilly aloofness all that warm charisma that has made her a star. Meanwhile, Portman, Law and Owen have to somehow make their characters sudden shifts in attitude and temperament credible, with varying degrees of success. All are at the mercy of Marber's empty, loveless pessimism.
Mike Nichols is one heck of a director and he has a quartet of perfectly capable actors at his command for this film. And he has trod this path before with films like WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (a great movie) and CARNAL KNOWLEDGE (an overrated movie), so he has experience in turning theatrical artifice into credible cinema. But those films had complex stories and even more complex characters (and arguably, much better actors). Here all Nichols has is Marber's adaptation of his own "award-winning play," which presumably has lost something in the translation. As a result, the closer you look, the less there is to see.