Imagine that you got four heterosexual, beautiful internationally famous actors, two men and two women, then try to create a barely credible story so that they can all sleep together, nothing gay of course. To make it edgy, the characters use sexually explicit, graphic language, but there is no actual sexual situation depicted onscreen, not even nudity, but the characters are actually deeply sexually conventional as they are aggrieved by their respective partners’ sexual transgressions instead of just electing for polyamory and just have an intimate little orgy, which seemed like the obvious solution to this personally conservative viewer. These alleged adults are nothing but angsty teenagers who talk about love and sex as if they were the first ones to discover them, but actually use it as a thinly disguised way to compete with their gender and jazz up their otherwise boring, fabulous beautiful lives. Don’t believe the hype—that is Closer. Closer made The Photograph feel like a masterpiece in retrospect.
Closer is a dreadful movie, and I am annoyed that none of you warned me! It stars Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. I am proud to announce based on highly scientific standards that Owen was the hottest one of the group at that particular point in time, followed by Portman, Roberts and Law, whom I honestly thought would have been in the lead, but actually made last place. Law is way hotter now, and Roberts literally never changes. I do not get the Portman lust even theoretically until the final scene in this film so I guess that the movie is good for something. There are so many reasons to dislike this movie so it is going to be hard to limit it for the purposes of a review.
If you want to guarantee that I will laugh inappropriately during your movie and be unable to take it seriously, have one of your main characters get hit by a car immediately at the beginning. It started with Meet Joe Black and not being a Pitt fan. There is definitely a segment of the community that will get their kicks from watching the character in Closer face impending doom. The narrative has no sense of rhythm. When the next act takes place, it is not easy to determine just by watching it when we are in the story, past or present, not by lighting, costume, acting. Instead we get awkward prose dumps to signal how much time has past, or a character has to talk about something in the past tense then the film cuts to the scene so that we know that we are watching a flashback instead of receiving visual signals to indicate that we are looking back to the past, which leads me to ask why the director could not just show the story chronologically, especially since flashbacks are not utilized until late in the story. If you are curious, the movie unfolds over the course of four years. There are moments that are supposed to leave you breathless like the end of The Usual Suspects that simply left me shrugging with relief that the film ended. Initially I thought this movie had themes about death, being voiceless, art as a lie to cope with the harsh reality of life, but by the end, I realized that the problem was not poor follow through with themes and situations, but a writer that could not disguise his desire to have his words spoken by various characters as if it held some immutable, universal truth and was just in love with his voice then made four different people say a bunch of pretentious, meaningless, ankle deep dialogue.
Closer is an adaptation of a play. It is not enough to just want to reach a larger audience to change mediums. A movie has to communicate a truth that a play could not, but this film feels like a play that was dragged kicking and screaming off the stage, determined not to interact with the real, three-dimensional world around it. For all its talk about sex, the emotional thickness becomes flimsy fairly early in the film. Even while toying with the most ridiculous romantic tropes, Portman and Law at least initially felt organically attracted to each other. The rest of the scenarios feel emotionless, flat, substituting aggressive, verbose insistence for any range of automatic human investment in each character, their interactions with each other and their overall story arc. They feel like archetypes, not people, and bad, laughable ones at that, a teenage boy’s idea of gender and sex. People get together who would otherwise likely be repellent to the other. People get married off screen and have passionate affairs while we see no evidence of either the potent seeds of magnetic attraction or the kismet of companionship. We get told a lot about love and sex, but the movie accidentally tells on itself, “Where is this love? I can’t see it.” Exactly. If it is the point that love and relationships are fictional creations, lies, and the truth is that we are alone and miserable, then there are more interesting ways to communicate it than this sanitized Calvin Klein ad. There are wordless ways to communicate, but this movie is so in love with words and concepts that it suffocates any other method to bolster the story and allow it time to breathe.
Closer relies on words, and those words are a disaster. “Why won’t you let me love you?” “You’re like the cat who got the cream. Stop licking yourself.” The latter line is supposed to be a devastating insult, a signal that the relationship is in trouble or that there is a pea under the mattress. Maybe the dialogue sounds clever on a page, unspoken, but give it breath and utter it out loud, and you will realize that actors are true professionals for saying any of it with a straight face. The actors make it sound better, but after awhile, it is just an absurd imagining of what people in relationships say to each other. They are horrible people, but not even magnificent bastards or memorably pathetic. These are not people. These are living, breathing Rube Goldbergian contraptions to make points.
Closer suffers from what all romantic dramas make me dwell on: being unrealistic. Photographers live in huge lofts. People do not get married that quickly. Are Americans allowed to live in another country that long without going through certain legal hoops? Writers do not suddenly get book deals after an otherwise inert, unnoticeable writing career. What was in the air during 2004 through 2005 (Sin City’s Jessica Alba) with the cinematic world plagued with strippers that do not strip yet are still called strippers then when they do strip, they are really just glorified go-go dancers. I hate nudity and sex scenes if they are not a plausible part of the story, but come on! Also two years later, and you are still wearing the same ratty coat. Nope.
Closer is an almost unwatchable mess. If you want to pretend that your favorite actors are auditioning to be the most joyless, lifeless or if you are Owen, aggressive phone sex operators, then this film is for you. Skip this conventionally prudish movie cloaked in vulgar clothing.