Movie Review: Closer

Closer

It took a little while for this film to make its way from the larger theatrical venues to my smaller town. But the critical word on the movie was such that I was just about ready to make the sacrifice of a road trip to head for a larger city to see it. Thankfully, it showed up in a local theatre this weekend. There was little fanfare and even less advertising for the movie, but I suspect that any area movie buff who has been paying attention was in the audience this weekend for their first chance to see Closer. I was no exception.

Closer tells the story of four people who become intertwined through a series of mischances, accidents, betrayals, love, and lust in modern day London. First, Dan (Jude Law) meets Alice (Natalie Portman) when he is passing by as she is struck by a cab. Captivated by what he calls her "disarming" charm, the two become lovers. Then Dan meets Anna (Julia Roberts) when she is hired to photograph him for a book jacket. The attraction there, too, is instant at least from Dan's side. Feeling rebuffed by Anna's disinclination to involve herself in a relationship with a man who is living with another woman, he wreaks a subtle vengeance against Anna that eventually leads to her meeting Larry (Clive Owen), a lonely dermatologist. As each character loves and loses, is betrayed and betrays, the four are bound more tightly and ever increasingly against their will into a painful quadrangle of mingled relationships. Larry insists forgiveness is the only way love can survive, but is unable to forgive; Dan confesses he's an idiot. Anna masters a mask of happiness to cover her lack of fulfillment, and Alice has a story of her own that simmers far beneath the surface of the emotional Bohemian others find so fascinating.

The plot is both deceptively simple and complex, much as relationships themselves can be. Originally a stage play (Clive Owen played Dan in the live production, but has graduated to the more mature Larry here), many of the lines still resound with the flavor of the boardwalk. If there's a flaw in Closer, it's that the dialogue—which would have been perfectly suitable in a live stage setting—echoes of the stage here, and "stagey" isn't a compliment when it's describing character interactions in a movie setting. But even in light of lines that really don't work well onscreen, the actors pull it off. In fact, Closer is a tour de force of acting. Astonishingly, none of the actors overwhelms the others or the production by emoting too much or instilling melodrama into roles that are already dramatic enough. Julia Roberts shows that her Oscar® was no fluke; Jude Law may find himself nominated again for an Oscar® of his own (the studio is pushing nominations for both as leads). But the Golden Globe nominations just released may herald a more likely result when the organization skipped over Roberts and Law while nominating Clive Owen and Natalie Portman for their supporting roles. Owen and Portman are both astounding, and in the company of performances like those given here by Roberts and Law, that's really saying something. Portman in particular is nothing less than brilliant.

The direction—ably handled by award-winning director Mike Nichols—and the editing do a fine job of adapting the stage play for the big screen. Although the early moments of the film seem a bit slow, and there is some confusion when scenes change, everything is tied together nicely and the early moments make sense in later, more fully fleshed context. The confusion really only lasts until your brain catches up with the idea that there are gaps in time between some of the scenes that you don't know about until the characters start talking about past events that have obviously occurred between the scene you're watching now and the one that just ended. In truth, I wondered for about 15 minutes if I was watching yet another much-touted and deeply disappointing film. As it turns out, those 15 minutes were set-up for what proved to be a movie that I found very effective—and more than a little affecting.

I recognized parts of myself and my own past relationships in brief snippets of each character, and found myself wounded at times right along with the hurting people onscreen. I imagine the same will prove true for most people. Closer is very much the story of how much love can hurt, not only in the ways we can be hurt by those we love or the manner in which we can hurt them, but most painfully of all in the way we can sometimes choose to rub salt into our own bleeding wounds. Closer hurts at times to watch, but it's also cathartic in some ways. To leave a theatre drained by the pain of others is testament to just how real those others have become and how much you care about them, warts and all. That's something that only the most well made films are capable of doing, and Closer falls neatly into that category of movie.

FAMILY SUITABILITY: Closer is rated R for "sequences of graphic sexual dialogue, nudity/sexuality, [and] language." This is not a movie for children. That sexual dialogue is explicit, and the language no less so. In fact, even teenagers who could handle the language simply don't have enough life experience to appreciate much of the story that Closer tries to tell. Frankly, without the ability to relate to at least one of the characters, Closer would lose a great deal of its impact. But for anyone old enough to have loved and lost, or even more importantly to have loved and overcome loss, Closer will prove a bittersweet and perhaps haunting tribute to what so many of us have suffered in our own lives.