I do love movies, and I have a love for theater that I don’t get to enjoy very often, so sometimes the thing to do is watch a movie based on a play. A good playwright can adapt his or her own work, or even make something more cinematic out of it. It wasn’t much of a surprise that director Mike Nichols’s Closer was originally a play. Regardless of where the scene is set or what’s happening, it really is a four person show, something that would work well with a play.
But that doesn’t mean it’s anything bad. It’s just obviously based on a play.
The movie opens in London as Dan (Jude Law) and Alice (Natalie Portman) are walking down a busy street, each alone, but catching each other’s eye. Alice is hit by a taxi, so Dan takes her to a hospital. The two hit it off. Dan is a wannabe writer, and Alice is a sometime stripper from New York City who just decided to go to London and see what’s what. Time passes and Dan writes a best seller about Alice’s life, posing for the book jacket for professional photographer Anna (Julia Roberts), and Dan can’t help flirting with her, even after Alice overhears the exchange. Later still, Dan poses as Anna in a public online chat room, enticing dermatologist Larry (Clive Owen) to meet her in a spot Dan knows Anna loves to spend time in for…reasons. Those two hit it off…at first.
From there, the foursome seem to spend all their time over the next few years breaking up, recombining, lying to each other, and generally using sex and love to hurt each other. And for all this movie is about sex, there’s none of it onscreen. We only hear about it as various character interrogate their unfaithful partners to find out what exactly they were doing with each other. There’s plenty of talk about sex, but none of it onscreen, even in the scenes set in the strip club where Alice works.
Then again, this isn’t a story about sex but about how people who presumably love each other can really hurt each other, and the ways the characters react to all the pain around them says a lot about each one. Dan and Anna are a bit more callous than most, Dan due to being something of a wannabe playboy who fancies himself an observant student of human nature–and oddly enough is possibly the worst of the bunch at seeing how other people feel–with Anna a bit more jaded due to her own past experiences. Larry wears his heart on his sleeve, and all three of these actors turn in great performances. Heck, Owen was in the stage version, but he was Dan there and not Larry.
But then there’s Portman, and her Alice is easily the most sympathetic of the four. True, like the others she tells her share of lies, but she may also be the most truthful of the bunch. Clearly the youngest character and cast member, Alice is a bit naive and something of a romantic, the one most interested in love, and the one most hurt when her partner loses interest. Portman shows a good deal of vulnerability, and she truly earned the Oscar nomination she got for this one.
Acting as an exercise in how dishonesty and unfaithfulness can bring pain to others, Closer is the kind of movie that says that the people we’re closest to are the people we’re most able of actually hurting through our own selfishness and callousness. I would think most cases of this don’t go to the extreme of this story, but it’s no less true for each and every one of us.
Grade: A
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