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Tainted Love
Closer chooses intensity over truth
by Paige M. Travis
Men and women, bound together forever by nature, are likewise divided by some sort of eternal inability to understand one another. Maybe it’s that inability that inspires obsession, which in turn causes them to manipulate, provoke and otherwise emotionally torture each other. Such behavior—which some people call love—is at the flawed heart of Mike Nichols’ new movie, Closer.
The convoluted story unfolds in vignettes separated by different lengths of time—minutes, hours, or months; context clues reveal which. Alice (Natalie Portman) is a recent New York transplant in London who catches the eye of Dan (Jude Law). Their flirtatious sidewalk glances distract Alice, who, unfamiliar with London traffic, steps into the path of an oncoming car. Dan takes her to hospital, and their courtship begins. A year later, Dan has written a novel and is having his book jacket portrait taken by recent divorcee Anna (Julia Roberts). Their chemistry is instant and undeniable, consummated with a tender, exploratory kiss. Anna refuses to see him again, but he insists. Progressive flashes reveal the increasingly complicated and overlapping relationships, which now include Anna’s boyfriend-then-husband Larry (Clive Owen).
The twists and turns of this foursome’s story have the lurid appeal of a reality show, only with an unbelievably gorgeous cast and some explicit sexual language. The film is sexy—more through language than skin—and intense; each actor has perfected his or her own version of the “Don’t you dare” stare. But because so much is apparently going on inside their heads, not much actually happens.
What will audiences make of these four hot movie stars playing out a kind of Jerry Springer who-did-what-with-whom in better lighting and wardrobe? They might be bored and put-out, like Adam Sandler fans who went to see Punch Drunk Love wanting a dumb comedy and getting something else instead.
Other viewers who aren’t bored or disappointed may just be perplexed by the filmmakers’ portrayal of hyper-obsessive lovers. Patrick Marber adapted Closer’s screenplay from his own play, which won international acclaim and awards in 1997. His characters talk a lot (supporting my proposal of the new genre, psychosexual talkie) always in a self-protective way that obscures truth and honesty, which along with their opposites—lies and deception—are popular topics with these four. But they wield those very things like weapons against each other. In Marber’s world, men’s love is based on sex; for women, it’s security (and the sex is good too). The words just wrap the lies in pretty packages, and the lies protect the tellers from intimacy and real trust.
Through all the trauma traded from lover to ex-lover and back again, these movie stars give the performances of their lives. Portman recalls the intense melange of sexuality and innocent vulnerability from her film debut at age 13 in The Professional. Roberts is given less to do; her character basically gets tossed back and forth in a power play between Law and Owen. But she holds her own in helping max out the levels of sexual tension and guilt. Because, after the plot becomes secondary to the film’s action, personal tension is what Closer hangs its hat on. Much of that tension isn’t as steamy as it is explicit. At one point two characters chat online about their sexual fantasies, and in another scene Larry demands that Anna own up to all the different ways she and Dan have diddled each other. Like the typed-out words, this grocery list of sex acts is mere verbiage unconnected to feelings or individuals. It trivializes the connections these couples have with each other (and keeps the film to an R rating).
Closer is reminiscent of playwright and director Neil LaBute’s early films, The Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors, in which the battle of the sexes is waged without remorse. People are unrepentantly selfish, willing to do anything that elevates their sense of power. But the difference is that those people were up front about their callousness, caught up in a co-dependent desire to tear each other down. The inhabitants of Closer throw around the word “love,” but their destructive behavior just deflates the word into meaningless.
Closer won’t leave viewers feeling very good about human nature—if they choose to believe that this is what people are like when stripped down to their basest desires. But neither did Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which Nichols directed back in the ‘60s. Where that film, based on Edward Albee’s groundbreaking play, showed a dark side of heterosexual relationships that hadn’t been portrayed so starkly before, Closer isn’t anything viewers haven’t seen or heard before—either in life or on film. Sex, Lies and Videotape still does it better.
December 2, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 49
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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