Marber's Hollywood suck-hole vehicle

Rating: 1/10 (5 April 2005)

Patrick Marber has never had a sexual relationship with a woman, particularly an American woman, as Closer demonstrates. But Hollywood commerce is so overwhelmed that this Oxford graduate has written a hit play starring, not one female American citizen, but two, that the "pocket-book" (English: wallet) is out and the check handed over before the ink is dry. Two drawling Yankee stars in London who ask each other where the "loo" is! How charming! We'll overlook Marber's utterly blatant device of disguising his ignorance by making one of them a "waif" so secretive (or vacuous) that she has no background at all, while the other is a "photographer" ---- need one say more? Or, for that matter, less? Marber, like Noel Coward, must be one of those men who "love their privacy" and write dirty about women, just as Noel Coward did, so very successfully in the 1920s, then went on to star in stiff-upper lipped anti-camp war movies. Talk about discipline, dear! War is relevant, because Marber accepted an award for his play from the London Evening Standard newspaper, which only a couple of years later was faking its front-page to make it look as if a huge crowd had cheered the demolition of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad, instead of a rag-tag group of stooges admitted by watching U.S. Marines psy-ops men. That when he was 25 Marber contributed to sketches by progressive comedian Rory Bremner and by the time he was 35 was composing this theatrical contrivance says everything about passing 30 and remaining trustworthy. Let's end this by listing just a few of the ways Marber demonstrates his utter ignorance of how an American woman works: 1. When she is knocked unconscious in the street by a passing car, she wakes up, smiles, and says: "Hello, stranger". 2. Although she works in a strip joint, and knows only his first name and entrance to his place of work a world away in Canary Wharf, she moves in with him. 2. Although she is a top professional photographer, she takes pictures of an unknown author for his first novel (that is the most ridiculous idea of all). 2 a. At his behest, she starts necking with him. 3. When she meets another American woman, a rival for her man, she inquires: "Where's the loo?" although she has just arrived in England. 4. She never speaks about herself. 5. When accosted in a public place by a sex-crazed stranger who flashes his lab-coat at her, she remains seated and addresses him with utter composure, then marries him.