Another entry in the adult's mature school of film-making.

Rating: 7/10 (4 December 2005)

Mike Nichols brings us an exercise in love and poses some complex - some pretentious - questions about the nature of humans. The motif that generally brackets each scene as repetition of the last with different variables could be taken as a statement that we are all the same as humans, that it needn't matter if it's Natalie Portman and Jude Law arguing or Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. That love is as material as those advertising it. Or it could be that it shouldn't be taken that far, and it is actually a simple examination of our nature as lovers: to love; to quarrel.
But whatever the film's repetitive structure is supposed to pertain, the film is ultimately a purposely complicated result of pseudo-maturity. The relentlessly ornamental dialogue is beautiful, and sounds like post-modern Chandler in a romance-drama setting. And for all its tricky one-line-ruminations, it gives the film a scent of Nouvelle Vague surrealism that would be - and IS - stale in any other modern movie. Nichols' direction is as stagely as the dialogue - not to say that it's theatrical - and gives the film a sense of refreshment. The London mist and grey-white streets, accompanied by Goldblatt's bare cinematography and the sparely tragic Damien Rice soundtrack all seat quietly next to one another to finish off the film's hush and lull sensibility.
The actors, too, are superb, and each withhold their characters with reassuring strength. The real darling of it all, however, is the overall feeling of conception about it. In the same way music can be conceptualised into a purposeful evocation of any theme, Closer is a document of love, and how it affects us, though not on such a large scale: it is a document of love affecting four people, and how they affect us.
This film is, for those who like to analyse-beyond-the-artist's- intentions, uncharted territory. But for shallower viewers, and viewers with more insight than either alike, Mike Nichols' 2004 outing is one that will be most enjoyed by those who believe maturity means being angry and upset.