Hollywood Stars Using Lacerating Words as Sexual Weapons

Rating: 8/10 (11 December 2004)

"Closer" seems more about guys and sex than about relationships.
It is less a contemporary (including very blunt Internet chat) London take on "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf," though there is a similar running theme of truth, lies and mutual fantasies, than a journey into Neil LaBute's scabrous territory where trust can't survive and male careers have a parallel with their possession of females. At least the women are in stronger positions than they were in at the time of Mike Nichols' "Carnal Knowledge." This film does make one wonder if the traditional practice of arranged marriages might not be as least as effective as love in serving as a basis for long-term relationships.
As a four-hander, it is weakened that Natalie Portman's and Clive Owen's performances blow Julia Roberts and Jude Law away. Owen's character is the showier male, with his hang-ups of rough sex fantasies and obsession with women as whores, while Law's character has some sort of mild mother complex.
Similarly, Portman's character is the more intriguingly independent female, recognizing the strengths and limitations of her sexual power over men she does and doesn't love, including passersby in the very naturally ironic closing shots. She is finally the most sympathetic character who we comparatively care about the most.
While Roberts almost manages to keep up, Law may be ill-served by the script. His character is practically two different people, one with one woman where he unsuccessfully tries to disappear from his physical beauty, another with the other where he uses it. He enacts them differently with different body language and props, but no motivation is obvious for his changes.
Nichols' directing is very involving, effectively opening up a play by opening up spaces, settings and locations. I don't know if the adaptation from the original had to account for the cast, but the script nicely incorporated explanations for having American women in London, as well as Natalie's youthfulness.
What didn't work was inconsistent changes in make-up and hair that did not support dialogue claims of a passage of time, as much as even three or four years between scenes, but nothing much changes in how they look, except occasionally for Portman's hair styles.
While it's a bit tiresomely arch having Law's character be a wannabe writer, Roberts' character as a photographer works very well for visualization, though her character's motivations are as inscrutable as her portraits.
Having a superstar cast as a Hollywood movie adaptation distributed in multiplexes causes audience problems as they were made very uncomfortable by the extremely blunt language, which wouldn't have caused as much of a ruffle in an art house audience, but audiences are just not used to watching these folks talk like this; Oprah's audience on a recent promotion for the film was so nonplussed that Roberts' joked that she had to learn these words for the film. I think independent films have been rated NC-17 for similar language. The language is so lacerating we think we are seeing more explicitness than we are.
The music selections are very effective, from the opening use of Damien Rice's "The Blower's Daughter" with its repeating chorus of "I can't take my eyes off of you/I can't take my mind off of you." But the repeating use of opera for inspiration and dates didn't really make sense for the characters and seemed more to indicate either an avoidance of time passage or that Nichols is out of touch with contemporary culture.
At least the strip joint played appropriate music. During Natalie's strip tease I kept thinking of Oprah asking her what her dad would think of that scene and she wryly responding that he's a gynecologist.