Mike Nichols has been enjoying a bit of a renaissance of late. The director behind such efforts as The Graduate and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has always had a sturdy reputation, but his recent dalliances with further adaptations of stage plays (the underrated Wit and the star-studded epic production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America) have provided a welcome return to critical exposure. Now, with his latest work, Closer, he is the premiere link between the great scripts on Broadway and providing them with either a Hollywood or a cable TV treatment of the highest caliber.
Structurally, Closer is not a complicated film, and yet it is anything but simple. There are parts of it that rip right to the core of the human spirit and the often-fragile nature of relationships. On the surface, the characters may speak of trivial matters in short sentences, but there is infinitely more going on than would initially appear.
Jude Law, the prolific actor who seems to have plunked a stake in Hollywood movies this year, plays Dan, an obituary writer who one day encounters a young exotic dancer named Alice (Natalie Portman). After taking her to the hospital, the two begin a relationship. A while later, when Dan is photographed for a book cover by the beautiful Anna (Julia Roberts), he finds himself having feelings for her as well. His advances are rebuked, and he sets Anna up with a man who has visited a sex chat room (Clive Owen), unaware his ironic matchmaking joke will lead to a successful union between the two.
The movie proceeds to show a serious of encounters among the quartet, often picking up scenes either immediately before or after a physical encounter has occurred/is about to occur. The characters engage in brutally honest conversations that serve both to make their sexual encounters more exciting and to masochistically fuel their needs to hurt each other. The overt situations would be more difficult to absorb if they weren’t the kind of thing that we tend to see on a smaller scale every day.
Early on, there is no doubt that Closer is ripped directly from a stage play. Its action is fueled by the choices the characters make and the moments that change their lives. It strikes a nerve not just with the audience, but clearly with the actors performing the material. They inhabit it. They cling to it like a blanket. Whether it’s Law’s piercing search for answers he already suspects the answers to, or the doubting glances of Portman as she measures her lovers up and down, the cast is on fire here.
I’ve heard mixed things about this movie. Saint Johners have little patience for films that are more grounded in reality than they care to ‘fess up to. Often, they prefer the diversion of fiction to mask what the movie is really trying to say. The only people who won’t like Closer are those that either refuse to be honest with themselves, or who have never really given their heart to another person. This is not a movie only for artsy-fartsy types. It’s a movie about people for people.
