Attack of the Moans
Mike Nichols (The Graduate, Working Girl) must have been in a bad mood when he picked Patrick Marber's play, Closer, to direct for the cinema. This star vehicle is one long, moaning diatribe against romantic love with pretty people looking dour, talking in riddles and agonizing in self-pity. It is the screen's most pretentious display of pedantic nonsense this year.
The love quadrangle begins with what seems like a budding romance, which is actually a forewarning to Closer's theme that love is not only blind but also deformed. Jude Law's writer is walking along a crowded London street, in slow motion, toward Natalie Portman's street urchin stripper. It is love at first sight—bathed in lush photography like the whole movie—and then, suddenly, a car hits Portman's ragamuffin.
What seems like an innocuous device to connect the fated pair—Law rushes to her aid and, as she lay wounded but alive, she speaks to him—is the emblem for Closer's contrived misery. They go to the hospital, exchange lines in that West Wing-style of incomplete sentences, ride a bus and, apparently, fall in love. But Closer holds that love is based on whim, not on values, and Law's writer is cheating on Portman by the next scene. Closer begs us to want to know why. For a while, it works.
Enter Julia Roberts, playing a photographer and the movie's most despicable character. She seduces Law, who flirts back, until Portman shows up and does a pouty version of her role in The Professional had her girl-assassin grown up and gone bad. Finishing the foursome is Clive Owen as a doctor who's just about the dumbest dude on the World Wide Web. Owen fares best, having played Law's role on stage, though that's like being dressed for dinner on the Titanic, and his overwrought breakdown during Portman's striptease is awkward.
Closer is a gimmick of time frame—months go by in seconds, books are published, characters get married, partners change—and at one point it goes backwards, just when it desperately needs to wrap things up and let everyone go home. As Closer's moral center, Law's sniveling writer makes no sense. Every event crucial to his character and to the plot is unaccounted for: his book is published, yet Marber reveals nothing about its meaning—he cheats on Portman and becomes obsessed with Roberts, who's as enticing as cardboard here—he throws himself into the role of a man-hunting female whore on the Web to retaliate against Roberts or because he likes it (it's never clear which) and he comes crawling back to Portman, who's as seductive as your girlfriend's gangly kid sister.
Men go bad, women go weak, and it's all talky, showy and stiflingly claustrophobic. That the four leads look pretty and trim is no consolation. Watching people tear each other apart with smug sarcasm is as monotonous as it sounds. Closer is closer to a high-gloss spit at the world, with a steady soundtrack that, like its plot, comes from nowhere.
The love quadrangle begins with what seems like a budding romance, which is actually a forewarning to Closer's theme that love is not only blind but also deformed. Jude Law's writer is walking along a crowded London street, in slow motion, toward Natalie Portman's street urchin stripper. It is love at first sight—bathed in lush photography like the whole movie—and then, suddenly, a car hits Portman's ragamuffin.
What seems like an innocuous device to connect the fated pair—Law rushes to her aid and, as she lay wounded but alive, she speaks to him—is the emblem for Closer's contrived misery. They go to the hospital, exchange lines in that West Wing-style of incomplete sentences, ride a bus and, apparently, fall in love. But Closer holds that love is based on whim, not on values, and Law's writer is cheating on Portman by the next scene. Closer begs us to want to know why. For a while, it works.
Enter Julia Roberts, playing a photographer and the movie's most despicable character. She seduces Law, who flirts back, until Portman shows up and does a pouty version of her role in The Professional had her girl-assassin grown up and gone bad. Finishing the foursome is Clive Owen as a doctor who's just about the dumbest dude on the World Wide Web. Owen fares best, having played Law's role on stage, though that's like being dressed for dinner on the Titanic, and his overwrought breakdown during Portman's striptease is awkward.
Closer is a gimmick of time frame—months go by in seconds, books are published, characters get married, partners change—and at one point it goes backwards, just when it desperately needs to wrap things up and let everyone go home. As Closer's moral center, Law's sniveling writer makes no sense. Every event crucial to his character and to the plot is unaccounted for: his book is published, yet Marber reveals nothing about its meaning—he cheats on Portman and becomes obsessed with Roberts, who's as enticing as cardboard here—he throws himself into the role of a man-hunting female whore on the Web to retaliate against Roberts or because he likes it (it's never clear which) and he comes crawling back to Portman, who's as seductive as your girlfriend's gangly kid sister.
Men go bad, women go weak, and it's all talky, showy and stiflingly claustrophobic. That the four leads look pretty and trim is no consolation. Watching people tear each other apart with smug sarcasm is as monotonous as it sounds. Closer is closer to a high-gloss spit at the world, with a steady soundtrack that, like its plot, comes from nowhere.
