Warning: Love in Progress

Rating: Null/10 (26 June 2012)

Mike Nichols directs "Closer", arguably his best film since "Silkwood" and "Carnal Knowledge". Like many of Nichols' early works, the film is based on a stage-play, in this case a 1997 Patrick Marber play of the same name.
Like "Carnal Knowledge", the film revolves around two couples who repeatedly cheat on one another, attempt to scar one another and struggle to define their own criss-crossing relationships. In this regard, two characters, one a photographer and one a writer, attempt to keep other human beings at a comfortable distance, via either camera lenses, computers or pens. Another character prefers the anonymity of false identities (false names, accessories, fake stripper personas etc) and foreign countries. Each of these characters views love as a blank slate or attractive absence upon which they can project their own illusions and/or desires. Once the object of desire gets too close the attraction wears off. They are counterpointed to another character, played by Clive Owen, who is brutally honest (and hilariously vulgar) when it comes to his personal perversions, lusts and genuine affections. Owen's a doctor, a pragmatist, enamoured by a brutal corporeality, and seems initially to be the only character who seems capable of a healthy relationship. With time, though, we see that love for all four characters is largely an exercise in power, damage infliction and a game of rampant hormones. "Without truth we're just animals," one character says, but truth is precisely what wrecks all the film's relationships. The film's title thus has a triple, somewhat paradoxical meaning, love strongest when we AREN'T CLOSE to the object of desire, impossible UNLESS one gets truly close, and often SABOTAGED by the discomfort of proximity.
While Marber's characters are as dysfunctional and hyper-sexualised as our own Western societies, they all seem to have their own very specific, individual faults. The two women, played by Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts, seem unable to love themselves, and so survive by creating idealised bodies to be "loved through", one creating photographs as a bulwark, the other turning her own body into protective art. When these shields are broken and their lovers get closer, they both deliberately sabotage their relationships. Much of the film contains characters vying for the complete possession of their lover, attempting to dig deeper and deeper in an attempt to gain some secret knowledge or deeply intimate space which may or may not exist; "closeness" here is likened to a kind of possession. And of course when this raw, uncompromising level is reached, the lovers recoil in shock; closeness seems traumatic.
Like most stage-play adaptations, "Closer" largely consists of talking heads, long conversations and simple camera set ups. Nichols is an old-hand at this, so he makes it work. The film is gripping, tense and flows well, but there is something overly sensational about its plot, Marber deliberately constructing his story as a tawdry car-wreck, audiences invited to peer, sleazily, at festering, mutilated corpses. Sadly, much of "adult theatre" has become this way, and an increasing number of play-writes turned directors - think early-Mamet and Neil LaBute – who once relied on a certain kind of high-brow sensationalism to sell tickets to dulled audiences, are starting to bring these same caustic plots over to film. It's not that play-writes aren't right to expose certain aspects of human nature, but that often these stories seem sneering or designed to shock.
Still, there's lots of good stuff here. The film's screenplay is interesting in the way it omits the parts of its plot that more formulaic films would have dwelt on, its cast is mostly good (the stilted dialogue may irk those unfamiliar with stage plays) and Nichols' direction is mostly fine, aside from a poor opening and closing. The film is predominantly vulgar and hopeless.
Incidentally, actors Natalie Portman and Jude Law played similar characters in Wong Kar-Wai's "My Blueberry Nights", a film somewhat similar to Nichols' "Closer". Portman's performances in both film were poor; she can't convey "sexiness". In both films the film-makers also strain heavily to make their young, female characters quirky and likable (lots of hair dye and hipster hats). See Antonioni's "Beyond the Clouds" for this material done about as good as it can be done.
8/10 - Worth one viewing. Makes a good companion-piece to "Eccentricities of a Blond Haired Girl", "Vertigo" and "Shopgirl".