Just got around to seeing Mike Nichols’s film Closer this weekend, and I liked it quite a bit. I generally enjoy films about lovely people behaving abominably toward one another–it’s just sort of my aesthetic. (This is why Eyes Wide Shut is my favorite Kubrick film, and why I love Velvet Goldmine, for example.) The behavior in this film was truly ghastly, on an almost Mike-Leigh’s-Naked level. (Those people were poor and ugly rather than rich and gorgeous, but the similarities outweigh the differences, I think.)
Some quick, discombobulated thoughts:
1) Natalie Portman was terrific, a million times better than her hideous tic-fest in Garden State. She was like a different actress here. Able to use her weird, showy, aren’t-I-sexy-in-a-barely-legal-way mannerisms rather than feebly attempting to hide them, she created a character with more hooks than a box of tackle. Fine work.
2) Clive Owen was also very good, certainly one of the most involving and believable bastards in recent cinematic memory. What I like about Owen is that he truly looks like he could and would kill somebody at any time. If he had murdered any of the film’s three other characters I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash.
3) Play-to-film adaptations are often quite dull to look at, with utilitarian scoring and cinematography; Nichols, to his great credit, made several choices (those voluptuous zooms!) that resonated in ways an all-business translation wouldn’t have done. Kudos too for the song selection in the strip-club scene; have there ever been such appropriate filmic usage of the Prodigy’s “Smack My Bitch Up” and the Smiths’ “How Soon is Now?”?
4) I found the film’s faith in the audience’s ability to make those chronological jumps forward in time very refreshing. Devout followers of my wildly influential critical oeuvre will note that this is something I do often think about in the context of comics–Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar and Poison River pull a similar trick off with aplomb, for example, while brother Jaime’s trust in his audience to play along with this ploy in Locas is belied by the relative psychological doughiness of his characters. Playwright and screenwriter Patrick Marber deploys a handful of props and throwaway lines (cigarettes, pet names, etc.) and sleight-of-hand-style builds complex–yet easily traceable–character arcs out of them.
5) I was particularly struck by the evolution of Jude Law’s character, who is transformed from befuddled obituarist to consummate preening asshole in the year that elapses offscreen between the film’s first and second sequences. Perhaps Marber and Nichols wanted to test the audience early: “Okay, let’s see if they roll with this!” But it works, largely because of the unspoken monkeywrench it throws into a potentially pat understanding of the dynamic between the characters–namely, it seems like a year with Natalie Portman’s Alice has turned Law’s Dan into a grade-A cocksucker. Law, whose charm is both more sincere and more sinister than that of, say, Hugh Grant (at least outside of Maurice), makes both halves convincing even as he leaves it up to the viewer to put the two together.
6) The strip-club scene was pretty hot. So, for that matter, was Julia Roberts’s under-duress litany of sexual positions and practices indulged in by her (well, Anna) and Dan. Cf. Pretty Woman, which for all its wince-inducing romanticization of prostitution didn’t dare actually conjure up images of its leading lady actually fucking somebody. And yes, both scenes were excruciatingly uncomfortable to watch, and no, that didn’t lessen the eroticism.
7) The film worked for me because I thought it cast a fairly pitiless eye on the lengths to which people will go in order to justify their own terrible and (dare I say it?) immoral behavior. I was reminded a lot of shows like The Real World, where, under the cover of “finding themselves” and “being free to fully experience this opportunity” and innumerable other iterations of feel-good bullshit, people cheat on their girl/boyfriends left right and center, almost without compunction, and then act all wounded and shit when they discover that people (and perhaps themselves) are unhappy with their behavior. No shit, Sherlock. Sexual exploration and expression has become infantilized–me me me, gimme gimme gimme, more more more. I really don’t have a problem with people having sex with whoever they want whenever they want, provided it’s consensual AND INFORMED. If your sex life is based on a lie of whatever sort, it will hurt not just the other people, but (unless you’re a true sociopath) you. That, I thought, was the message of this movie. So, well done.