Mike Nichol’s new film Closer is infused with this type of magical chemistry, and at times the potency of the alchemic mix threatens to make its world teeter off balance. With a screenplay by Patrick Marber, adapted from his play of the same name, the picture is a tone poem to both love and its darker side.
Dan (Jude Law), an obituary writer and aspiring novelist, shares a moment of charged visual contact with a beautiful girl as he makes his way to work in London one day. Her name is Alice (Natalie Portman)—a hip, self-assured New Yorker who has just arrived in the city. An accident while crossing the street puts her in the hospital and Dan, although still a stranger to her, remains close by to offer help.
Fast-forward to a few years later. Alice and Dan are together in the romance that seemed destined from their first gaze. Dan, at a photo shoot for the jacket of his soon-to-be-released novel, meets the stunning photographer Anna (Julia Roberts), and mutual attraction quickly turns into a brief moment of indiscretion. Ultimately rebuffed by Anna, who is aware of his relationship with Alice, Dan responds with an internet sex joke that is both cruel and hilarious.
At times the film plays on our modern fantasies of sexual debauchery—desires most of us would never disclose—to consistently amusing ends. Dan’s joke ultimately has unintended effects as Anna meets and begins to fall in love with Larry (Clive Owen), a dermatologist possessing—being euphemistic here—an avaricious sexual appetite.
The film takes another temporal leap forward and we find Alice, Dan, Larry and Anna all at an exhibition of Anna’s photography. Having not seen each other in a year, Dan approaches Anna once more and this time his advance becomes the catalyst that drives a series of wicked betrayals and abandonment as the four characters become deeply connected. The lovers occupy a universe where passion reigns over reason and disorder is inevitable; each greedily takes what he or she momentarily desires while delivering perfectly placed words intended to cause maximum hurt to another as they all struggle to understand what it means to love.
Despite their clearly egregious ways, Nichols’ camera shoots his handsome couples with tremendous affection. His tight close-ups put you right in the moment so that you can almost feel the heat emanating from the skin of their passion-filled bodies. His trademark zoom shots, while they still precisely cut through space, now move with the grace of an aged master. Like a Cartier-Bresson photograph, they reveal “the decisive moment” during which the emotions that threaten to sweep away the characters instantaneously come together.
The actors also do their part delivering the full emotional payload, especially Portman. As much as she manages to make you love her character—and it is hard not to after her adorable Buster Keaton references—she also convinces you that Alice may not necessarily be someone you want to have around. The actors are also all indebted to Marber for his witty and overall intelligent script, which makes a terrific transition from the stage to the screen.
Essentially structured as a love comedy, the picture’s form ultimately proves elusive. At its center is the theme of the dangers associated with a mad pursuit of the dream vision of love, a vision so compelling that it can blind us to the good things that stare us in the face. Consequently, it cannot quite conform to the demands imposed by the artifice of comedy.
Without spoiling the ending, the thematic content complicates the conclusion but, ultimately, makes it much more interesting. The picture simultaneously spends our emotional fuel taking us on the roller coaster ride of love’s up and down’s, its joy’s and losses, its laughter and tears. By the conclusion, you may be too emotionally drained to feel anything, bringing his story surprisingly close to the conventions of true tragedy.
Maybe this was Nichols and Marber’s clever intention all along. Closer is a film that is at times simply arresting. Everyone who has ever thought about love and the compromises it forces, about when to have faith in the chemistry of a connection versus when to settle for what you already have, should not want to miss.
—Tony A. Onah