And so it is

Rating: 8/10 (11 January 2009)

Of the four protagonists in Closer, Clive Owen's Larry is perhaps the most direct...he likens his being with Julia Roberts' Anna as "the princess with the toad". Told that it is a frog, not a toad, he insists "toad". And as the movie continues, we realize that he was correctly describing himself right from the first, warts and all.
Two other people - Jude Law as the aptly named Dan Wolf - and Nathalie Portman as Alice, make up the rest of the quartet of characters who fall in and out of lust/love with each other over a period of years.
What bothers me most about many of the reviews here, is that people complain that people in Closer are unlikeable. Well, so what? Considering how many of us lie and cheat in love - often as much to ourselves as to others - how many of us are really all that attractive? The opening words of this film are from a song by Damien Rice, where he intones "And so it is..." He is singing about infatuation verging on obsession, which is what Closer is really about - the way we obsess about each other to the point of destroying both the love and ourselves; the closer we try to get, the further apart we become. We may insist on the truth, but how will we recognize it if it is not what we want so desperately to hear? Polished performances of a slickly intelligent and often witty script are searingly directed to perfection by Mike Nichols, who has been in this territory before with "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?". The main difference is that in that earlier film, George and Martha KNEW the difference between surface and reality, whereas the four lost souls of Closer wander myopically through the landscape of their lives looking for signposts. At the end of Virginia Woolf, they at least had each other. At the end of Closer, no-one seems to have anything left at all. Perhaps the main point of Closer is that our images of ourselves can only remain beautiful from a distance; the closer we get, the blurrier it all becomes. This is a sad film in the end, but it is also one of the most adult films ever to be made. After all, stories of princesses and frogs are really for children, aren't they?