Closer DVD > Reviews > Is That Love?

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Liked it
Story	Satisfactory
Characters / Performances	Good
Special Effects	Standard
How does it compare to similar films?	Good

Advantages:	classily acted, coolly shot, makes it point
Disadvantages:	a little heavy handed, no sympathy grip

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Intimacy. A funny little word and with so many meanings… what is intimacy in a relationship? Most people would say that sex is pretty intimate, but then they'll also look for "real" intimacy, which broadly speaking is probably taken to be a feeling of closeness in friendship, and not just in lust. A kiss, say some, is more intimate than sex.

Closer is a film about intimacy, in that none of the protagonists have a clue what it is. The story isn't really as complex as people had suggested to me. Two couples wind their way through various adulterous twists and turns in an attempt to find happiness (or perhaps, as one character suggests, in an attempt to avoid it, since they don't think they deserve it). Larry (Clive Owen) is a boorish, highly sexed dermatologist with a ballistic temper, Daniel (Jude Law) a passive-aggressive failed writer; batting for the girls are Alice (Natalie Portman) a stripper-come-waitress and Anna (Julia Roberts), a glacially calm and yet fiercely troubled photographer.

To give too much away about who's with who is a) to ruin the complexities the film DOES have and b) beside the point. What's more interesting is each character arc and path.

Daniel is the most insidious. Apparently sweet and nerdish, he is revealed by turns to be arrogant, vicious, obsessive and the worst kind of coward: standing behind his necessity to be brutally truthful is his pride in the fact that, as insignificant as he knows himself to be, he can inflict pain this way, and feel powerful for it. Jude Law is sleazily expert in this role, and slappably believable.

Larry takes the crown for most directly unpleasant, but he is also the mouthpiece of the film. Almost all the key symbolic points involve him, from a key break up to the central point of the film where he shouts, "WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO DO TO GET A LITTLE INTIMACY AROUND HERE?!". Clive Owen shoulders the part masterfully, managing in a single stroke to be both a truly despicable human being and a heartbreakingly sympathetic victim. Perhaps this is because he is the most natural, human and believable of the characters (although Daniel's not far off), but I suspect it may also be because he has extraordinary talent as well as brooding good looks (okay, okay…that was the only mention, I promise).

Anna's bruised and glacial charm is vintage Julia Roberts in many ways: terse dialogue, a mixture of clipped and muttered sentences, wide-eyed victim appeal and the odd burst of deep-rooted strength. She's a mystery because she chooses to keep herself a little apart, and when her façade does slip to reveal a woman of passion and enthusiasm it's somewhat unsettling. Her first, uncomfortable, encounter with Alice sets the tone for what each woman is all about.

Alice is self-consciously unconventional, witty, and so utterly pithy and irritating that I wanted to forcefeed her her own wigs. No reflection on the stunning Natalie Portman, who acquitted herself with grace, she's just one of those really annoying characters who like to make profound statements in a singsong voice that write the whole world off with their pithy little epithets. This is particularly noticeable and irksome during a gallery scene where she gives her opinion on the exhibits. Her age doesn't help her here… she comes off as someone less mature and self-aware than Avril Lavigne. Having said that, later on in the film her teasing and toying is an excellent counterpoint to the rest of the characters who are constantly trying to untangle their lives rather than make them even more complicated as she does.

Clearly character rather than plot-driven (there is no plot to speak of that I could discern), this is more of a symbolic chess game than a wholly realistic portrayal of relationships. Larry is the conduit for the real message of the film; the mechanics of sex are always gruesomely fascinating, and the act itself can be considerably less interesting than the fact of it. No one in this film has any direct sexual contact on camera. But the fine details of what they've done "offstage" are always poured out like so much dirty bathwater all over the floor. And of course in the end the couple who have understood the point ARE finally seen in bed - one asleep, the other reading.

One thing the film really does have going for it is that it's rather beautiful. It pulls an opposite stunt to American Beauty, a film made to look like a play by the occasionally lumpen symbolism of its stage director. Patrick Marber's play becomes Mike Nichols's film. Since the characters are walking symbols, the shots don't need to be heavily laden with iconography, and they're not. Instead the film is constructed almost like a series of Anna's beautifully lit stills, with some distant shots reminders that the film is acting like a microscope, trapping the protagonists in an artificial environment and examining them from on high (see the scene in the fishbowl of the stripclub's "private" room).

On the other hand, it has an unmissable central flaw. These people are all SO unpleasant, that at times it loses what I think of as the sympathy grip - that thing that makes you care about the characters. I hated Titanic because it had no sympathy grip; I honestly didn't care if Winslet and Co sank to the bottom of the ocean because they were whiny and irksome. Closer does have moments of emotional clarity and gripping pace, but sometimes it's lost in the whinging hideousness of its major players. As the dusky kings and queens shuffle about the board, mating and checkmating, sometimes their deliberate coldness to one another, and lack of understanding about real closeness, makes them too detached from the viewer.

At 104 minutes, this isn't a bum-number and doesn't really outstay its welcome. The main problem with it might be that by its very nature, it's hard to want to watch this more than once. It can feel a bit like you've been lectured. With a not particularly memorable soundtrack but very cool (in the temperature sense), elegant visuals, it's a film above average, but short of brilliance.

Still worth watching once, though.

Cert 15

Ten out of ten if you can name the band I lifted the title from, though. :P