Unbelievably drab

Rating: 3/10 (6 August 2006)

It's clear from Closer just how drab Americans think we brits are. We live in a drab city, with drab weather, wear drab clothes and have drab, superficial relationships. Closer is like one of Woody Allen's down movies on downers. It's devoid of both wit and emotional intelligibility. I'd go further and say its artfully fake, with the conceit of a big name four-hander cast attempting to wallow in indecipherable emotional intensity for the sake of creating the sheen of an art-house effect. The script reference to an 'Elle Decoration' inspired bathroom is resonant to the entire motivation of the movie - it's relentlessly superficial, watching it is like having a conversation with a model in a New York cocktail bar. Loft apartments, photography exhibitions, arguments at the opera, the damien rice soundtrack: two hours of middle class tedium. Ironically, the film is peppered with endless references to sexual activity, obviously engineered to provoke some kind of polarised reaction from its audience, but there isn't actually any on-screen sex, which, given the billing of the stars might have redeemed some of the entry fee in curiosity value. Clive Owen perhaps deserves some kind of honorable mention as he battles to give some sort of 3-dimensionality to his rather sad sex-obsessed doctor character, and Portman threatens to be interesting on a couple of occasions. However, Law is consistently bland and Roberts, trying to play serious, looks as if she is medicated during most of her scenes. The script and plot is laughable, inexplicable and relies on the simply unacceptable coincidences happening after unsettlingly long gaps of time. The characters do the most bizarre things, justified in terms of emotional cowardice or obsessive love, but having 'done' both of those to some degree in the past, I didn't buy any of their actions or motivations. By the end of the movie, when one combination of the couple has got together/broken up yet again, I was literally begging for the credits to signal the end of my involvement in these dreary fictive lives.