Closer

I prefer when a movie is a movie. But when a movie is a very good play, we should be happy as well because there just aren't that many good things around.

This is a play, there's no mistaking. All the dynamics in it are seated in the words, all the motives in the four beings. There is no cinematic device used or necessary, except the revealing of the passport at the end, and I am sure that was handled differently in the stage version.

Mike Nichols makes a living out of taking constructions that work well on the stage and adding a few cinematic glosses so that the thing gives the impression it was born as a screen being. I find his tricks in this regard distracting, even a bit offensive because he hasn't adapted as the visual vocabulary has.

Never mind. Just eliminate the film components of its being and focus on the stage components and you still have something worthwhile, because here Nichols is still fresh.

You can read other folks to learn the story. It hardly matters. What matters to me is the clever, deep way the writer has constructed the thing. The visceral effect is from the panic and desperation of love. Nothing new there. What makes this effective, I think, are two things. Writerly things.

The first is that he hasn't just described the tippy balance of living in a romance. He hasn't just displayed the radical fuzziness and unpredictability of a world where that is all you know. He's made it the root of the story. This story has absolutely none of the logic to it that you expect when you see a love story. Everything seems real and natural after it has happened, but there's no way at all to predict what will happen next when you are in the thing. Its a great help in storytelling; you have to cling fast to what is happening. Its the best type of engagement, sucking you in by simply making you wonder, even worry about what is going to happen next. Its rare. Its good.

I'd like to point out how the four characters are constructed. A popular writing technique is to take one whole soul and break it into bits. Then the bits can get fleshed out imperfectly and interact so that the interaction has a being. In this case, start with a movie. What four pieces do you need? The writer (Dan), the photographer (Anna), the actor (Alice) and the director, the person concerned with the "skin" of the thing.

Its no accident, I think that it is impossible to settle on any one of these characters. You can go through this experience time and time again, each time tracing a different person's path, or the path of a relationship or even an urge.

This part is great too. Apart from Nichols' cinematic naivety, there's only one blot: Julia Roberts. She just doesn't understand what it means to be part of an assembly. She's not an actress in the real sense, the theatrical sense that Nichols knows how to sculpt. No wonder he wanted Cate Blanchett instead.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

I've seen Closer described as a cinematic triumph, but it's precisely not. The film wears its theatrical origins on its sleeve, and the presence of the camera is mostly irrelevant.

It also fails in a more subtle way. Initially, I watched four apparently amoral people, devoid of depth or shame, being clever at each other in increasingly hurtful and exploitative ways, and my mind rebelled. This can't be right, I thought, people don't talk like this. Hell, people don't *act* like this.

Then the light dawned. The characters seemed inhuman because they are. They aren't people at all, they're philosophical positions. When they talk, they're not talking. They're saying the things that people only dare think, asking the questions that haunt anyone whose relationship has gone horrifically pear-shaped. This isn't the story of four people and four relationships, it's an attempt to compress everything the author believes about human relationships into a film and bend it into a story. It feels artificial because it is.

With that realisation, I actually began to enjoy it, because Closer is a very clever film. I wish I could disagree with more of it, because many of the things it has to say about human relationships are painfully true. Every mistake you've ever made in a relationship is in here, and it's guaranteed to make you squirm at least once. It's also blackly funny in many places.

Without exception, the performances are fantastic, with the honours going to Natalie Portman's emotionally scarred escapist who wears lies like they were armour, and Clive Owen's brutal, perceptive, and ultimately absolutely human dirty doctor.

Be warned! The marketing campaign may lead you to think it's a comforting rom-com, but it's not. I wouldn't advise going with your partner unless you're rock-solid. You may leave asking some uncomfortable questions, and wondering how well you really know them...

This movie is a big game of narcissistic people who treat each other as puppets. There is no love, no truth, no good. In the beginning we all try to find a hero in the story, someone to sympathize with only to realize what we have is a bunch of mentally ill people making themselves suffer. Dan (Jude Law) is just a big kid longing for attention and a new toy, which he only cares for about 5 mins. Anna (Julia Roberts) is also desperate for attention and love since her ex left her for a younger girl. She is confused and unreasonable, her ego makes all the decisions instead of her mind. Larry (Clive Owen) is an agressive jerk, playing along Dan's little game, while Alice is just a naive, traumatized, young girl who falls in love and decides to avoid all the red flags and becomes part of this sick 4 some. Brilliant movie. Honestly not the ending what I hoped for tho (I just wanted all 4 of them together in a room while Slim Pickens rides the atom bomb there).

I couldn't wait to see this movie. Now, I realize I should have waited to see this movie until it could be rented.

This is a very cold film about some very unpleasant people who don't seem to be able to make up their minds about much. I liked the way it was done, I loved the acting, and I loved the use of "Cosi Fan Tutte" throughout the film.

Yet it left me feeling empty. I never saw the play, but I imagine it was quite powerful. As a film, it had a deadly detachment.

Certainly when one looks at a film like Virginia Woolf, also based on a play, also directed by Mike Nichols, also about some unpleasant people, one wonders why Woolf came off so well and this one didn't (for me, anyway). I think it's because Virginia Woolf is an incredible love story - at the end, when George explains that they're childless, and Martha says "We couldn't" referring to having a baby, one realizes what's underneath all of the unpleasantness.

In "Closer," there's just no payoff. Four people change partners, hurt one another, are seemingly incapable of doing anything else, but no one tells us why. Only the Natalie Portman character shows some humanity. But some isn't enough.

Mike Nichols is a fabulous director, but the direction wasn't the problem here. It's the characterizations. I can't agree with some of the other posters that the film was fascinating. I didn't find it so. The theater was packed because of good reviews. I suppose the critics are hungry for something intelligent, and obviously the ticket-buying audience is, and who can blame them?

But don't tell me this is the best you can come up with. When everybody walks out of the theater complaining, as they did after the showing I attended, there's a problem.

What a treat. Most of the people who came with me, left, half way through the film. I stayed to the end and I loved it. It moved me. A rarity this days. The face of Jude Law is, still, so full of possibilities. He seems unafraid of darkness. Strong. This is his most grown up performance. I can't wait to see what he'll become. (If he stays away from Hollywood as much as temptations permit, and keeps that purity, that makes his darkness so powerful, as intact as humanly possible). Julia Roberts is wonderful in a performance part Margaret Sullavan, part Jeanne Moreau but all her own. Clive Owen is a force of nature. Dangerous, compelling, human to the hilt. And what about Natalie Portman? Wow. No surprise here. But what a surprise. I'm sure she is going to amaze us for years and years to come. I'm really glad I stayed to the end.