CLOSER Review – Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen d: Mike Nichols

CLOSER (2004)

Direction: Mike Nichols

Cast: Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Clive Owen, Natalie Portman

Screenplay: Patrick Marber; from his own 1997 play

Oscar Movies

Clive Owen, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Closer

THE PERFECT DYSFUNCTIONAL DATE MOVIE

Mike Nichols' first feature film, an adaptation of Edward Albee's acclaimed play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is a harrowing dissection of two married couples whose inner demons are let loose during a night of game playing, drinking, and screaming. That was nearly forty years ago. Fast forward to 2004 and to Nichols' newest film adaptation of an acclaimed play, Patrick Marber's Closer, another look at two dysfunctional heterosexual couples, this time in the age of cyberspace and AIDS.

On the surface, not much has changed since 1966: although the action has been stretched out from one night to a couple of years, the new quartet also dwells in a social bubble in which they bicker, yell profanities, pretend to be someone else, and are utterly vicious to one another. On a deeper level, however, everything has changed. While Virginia Woolf — with the assistance of four actors in top form — lays bare the inner core of its characters, Closer barely scratches the surface of its one-dimensional, wholly artificial protagonists, played with varying degrees of effectiveness by the film's four leads.

The chief difference between those two Mike Nichols efforts lies in the source material. While Albee's words pierce the carotid, Marber's scratch an elbow and break a couple of fingernails. The situations depicted in Closer may seem hard-hitting, but without some form of psychological undercurrent to give them a sense of reality, all that lying, cheating, and nonstop partner switching come across as mere titillation.

For instance, London denizen Anna (Julia Roberts) dumps her husband Larry (Clive Owen) for Dan (Jude Law) without Marber ever bothering to let us know why Anna and Larry — who seem to be polar opposites — got married in the first place, or what exactly attracted Anna to Dan. Also, we never get to see their affair behind Larry's back, or the disintegration of Anna's marriage. Why, then, should anyone care when things become entangled later on?

Not helping matters is Dan's off-and-on girlfriend, Alice (Natalie Portman), who aimlessly bounces from here to there and then back to here again, only to make a momentous decision at the end of the film that is as unexpected as it is trite; it comes out of nowhere — and, unlike in the play, it goes nowhere. So, why bother?

Perhaps as a means to take away our attention from the vapidity of it all, Marber, who also penned the screenplay, comes up with a full array of sexually explicit lines that are bandied about during heated arguments. Now, never-ending yelling about the joys of extra-marital fucking may (or may not) shock the pious, but it will probably leave most filmgoers feeling merely impatient. For no matter how many times the four characters resort to sex talk (and that is all the sex they do on screen), nothing dissipates the overall artificiality of the film's dialogue and situations.

In the confines of the stage, such lack of realism may be permitted or even strived for, but in the naturalistic settings of Nichols' London it just looks silly. A final and unnecessary plot twist adds nothing to our understanding of what went on earlier. (No, it doesn't involve Dan and Larry hooking up for life, though that would have explained a lot about their behavior toward women.)

Despite the poorly delineated characters, actors' director Mike Nichols elicits at least a modicum of substance from three of the four leads — Natalie Portman's stilted Alice being the sole exception. Stripped of every artifice that has hampered several of her previous performances, a mature Julia Roberts shines as Anna, bringing a much needed touch of warmth to a role that in a less capable actress' hands would have become a pathetic nonentity. In fact, Roberts is the only performer who manages to fully rise above the script's shortcomings.

Clive Owen, who played Dan in the original stage version, displays a powerful, magnetic screen presence that would have made even Clark Gable shudder, but this talented actor is ultimately incapable of transforming stagy lines into real-life talk. Jude Law has a couple of good dramatic moments when he realizes that others can play his game as well as he does, but his attempts to make his immature loverboy charming fall flat, for Dan is nothing more than Alfie's obnoxious twin brother — something that makes Alice's and, particularly, Anna's infatuation with him seem patently absurd.

In the final analysis, Closer fails for the same reason that its truth-impaired characters fail to connect with one another: It keeps us at a distance from its inner core, focusing instead on melodramatic tricks and pseudo-shocking banalities. Those looking for a truly fearless look at dysfunctional human relationships may want to skip this Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? redux, and head to a DVD store to rent the real thing.

Note: A version of this Closer review was initially posted in December 2004.