Overall Rating
  Awesome: 25.47%
Worth A Look: 33.54%
Average: 17.39%
Pretty Bad: 8.7%
Total Crap: 14.91%
12 reviews, 89 user ratings
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| Closer |
by Robert Flaxman
"The anti-date movie."
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If you really love your partner, don’t take him or her to see Closer, the latest Mike Nichols film. Its evident thesis is that every relationship is a sham of some sort and that “love” is a joke, a word bandied about by people with no idea of what it’s supposed to mean. It’s an ugly, cynical film made more troublesome by the overall appeal of its packaging.Sprawled out over a four-year period, Closer tracks the various relationship permutations among writer Daniel (Jude Law), photographer Anna (Julia Roberts), stripper Alice (Natalie Portman), and doctor Larry (Clive Owen). Although the film’s basic concerns are love and sex, the latter receives no actual screentime. It’s easy to tell this was based on a play – we jump from one scene of talking to another scene of talking where some of the dialogue explains what happened in the often large gap of time that was most recently skipped.
Sex is all that really seems to drive any of these characters, though. Daniel lives with Alice for two years, then spends the next two years pursuing Anna after meeting her once (totally inexplicable, as Law and Roberts have about zero chemistry in this film). He ends up having an affair with her while she dates Larry, whom she met after he engaged in a cybersex session with Daniel, who pretended to be her.
In the trailer, Anna asks Daniel, “Why did you swear eternal love when all you wanted was excitement?” It’s a good question for the characters in this film as a whole, but the line was cut from the final product and the question is never answered. Why do the characters behave the way they do? More importantly, why does the film raise such questions and then try its hardest to avoid them?
The Daniel/Anna relationship makes, effectively, no sense, either as scripted or presented. Anna and Daniel meet once, when she takes his picture for the jacket of his book. They don’t seem to have any interest in each other or get along, then kiss anyway. Anna wants to go no further, as Daniel is taken. Daniel apparently spends the next four months stalking Anna – how sweet – and then, suddenly, they meet again at the opening of her gallery exhibition. They have now met twice. So what do they do? Claim to be in love with each other and start an affair. What?
Meanwhile, Anna has only been dating Larry for four months. She could have broken it off pretty easily if she were so in love with Daniel, but instead she marries Larry… only to tell him about the affair shortly thereafter and ask for a divorce. Why? Her only answer is that she thought it could work.
It’s bad enough that the relationships make little logical sense; they don’t even make sense on the most basic level. Because so many scenes feature characters either planning or explaining infidelities, there is virtually no chemistry between any of the leads for most of the film. Certainly it is immensely unclear how Law and Roberts get together; they just look uncomfortable in the same frame. Law and Portman sell the start of their relationship well enough, as do Owen and Roberts with theirs, but that these scenes work so well just makes the Law/Roberts affair look increasingly dull and pointless – and stripping the driving force behind most of your story of any believability is rarely a good idea.
Patrick Marber’s script, adapted from his own play, is a mixed bag. It has frequently great dialogue, but the time-leaping is awkward and the dialogue put in service of a fairly nasty message. Shockingly, the film actually ends with about the most pro-love conclusion possible, but this only makes the prior two hours seem more pointless.
The acting is likewise up and down, a bit of a problem when you have four leads and pretty much no one else (two other credited speaking parts, with one line each). Owen is the star of the ensemble – maybe having acted in the original play onstage works as an advantage, although he played Daniel there and not Larry, but he’s head and shoulders above the rest. Naked emotion, rage, dry wit, good humor – he does it all and then some. His Golden Globe was well-earned and an Oscar would be as well. The rest of the cast can’t live up to his example, though. Portman is fine but unspectacular, Law is great at times but seems to vanish for whole stretches, and Roberts just looks like she wants to be somewhere else. Of course, considering the character she’s stuck playing, who can blame her?
See Closer for Owen, and for some of the dialogue (much of it Owen’s), but stay away if you believe in love at all. Every time it seems the film is letting love win in some way, it twists the knife again, delivering either an arbitrary, uninspired declaration of love, or an arbitrary, uninspired explanation of why there’s no more love (or why what’s left isn’t enough). It never works. None of these characters is truly worth caring about, so why watch them do a series of bad things to each other? Bad things, stripped of a context in which they can truly be judged as bad, mean nothing, and such is the case here. All we’re left with is a vague attack on love’s reality, one that’s rather insulting, framed as it is by characters who never care whether love exists or not.It comports itself relatively well, but Closer ultimately falls apart. It may have good dialogue, but none of it can hide the fact that the film really has very little worth saying. Revoltingly cynical even at its best moments, Closer’s refusal to do anything important with such a cast of awful characters makes it that rare specimen: a waste of a bad premise.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=11189&reviewer=385
originally posted: 01/27/05 18:14:06
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USA
03-Dec-2004 (R)
DVD: 29-Mar-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
26-Jan-2005
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