Closer
Last night I saw Mike Nichols' movie Closer, based on the play by Patrick Marber, with Ben, Collin, Nate, Morgan, and her friend Lionel.
I've been a huge fan Nichol's recent big-screen adaptations of plays.
Watching Emma Thompson slowly die alone of cancer in Nichols' amazing rendition of Wit (Thompson helped write the screenplay) for HBO was like driving by a fatal accident on the highway. It was so unbearable, so awful that I was relieved when it was finally over, and yet I couldn't force myself to turn off the TV, nor even mute it as Thompson vomited onscreen for what seemed like an eternity.
Angels in America, Nichols' other recent adaptation, was widely applauded and, I think, wisely so. I'd read both Millenium Approaches and Perestroika and found them somewhat inscrutable — the dream sequences and hallucinations were hard for me to understand and all too often dialogue from different conversations was shuffled together like a poem for two voices. The movie, however, imbued reality to the surreal scenes and serialized some of the more serpentine dialogue. Still, Angels was so hard for me to watch that the second half spent six months on my TiVo waiting for me to finish it. It wasn't the death and dying that made it so difficult, although there was a lot of that. Instead it was the the abandonment that got to me. I found it excruciating to watch characters consider leaving their weaker boyfriends/wives, then actually leave them, then agonize over having left them, and then return to beg for forgiveness.
So after the negative buzz, it was with some trepidation that I agreed to go see Closer; some movies are more bearable with remote in hand. I expected it to be pretty hard to watch.
It wasn't.
It was cold and hard and certainly not a happy movie, but as there was no real chance to get emotionally invested in the characters, I didn't really care too much when they fucked things up. Closer is about four people who ruin their relationships for no good reason, other than that they are human. But the narrative skips the good parts of the relationships, so when they go bad we have no reason to think they might have been worth saving. In the entire movie I don't think we ever see Julia Roberts' character, Anna, happy enough that the actress can use her signature ear-to-ear smile.
Maybe, though, this was the point, that love is so ephemeral (or so meaningless) that we flit from relationship to relationship like we're looking for a place to stand in a crowded room. But Nichols shows us Clive Owens as angry and as mean as we are ever allowed to see any movie character, and later we see a pathetic Jude Law grovel so low that the director and writer must want us to believe his character has lost something of value. Again and again I found myself thinking "No, don't do it, it'll all work out, just don't be such a stubborn ass" to Law's character, Dan, but the reveal at the end (don't worry, it is well telegraphed) seems to suggest he was doomed from the very beginning.
You can tell that it is based on a play — the dialogue is central and the scenery is mostly static (it is stark, but sometimes beautiful). Film does offer some advantages over the stage. At the beginning of the Closer, Julia Robert's apartment/studio (it looks like perhaps it was an early 20th century surgery) is stunningly washed out, while Roberts is radiant. Later, though, the apartment is lit with warm color, and Julia Roberts, without makeup, is blanched, hollow-eyed. It is the worst I have ever seen her.
The movie spans about four years, but Nichols gives the viewer no overt indication that time has passed — we are left to infer it from the words and actions of the characters. Perhaps there were act breaks in the play to signify passage of time. At one point, confusingly, time moves backwards. I wonder why they chose to do that. We can only tell that it is earlier because of Julia Roberts' clothing.
Collin said he appreciated the lack of fades and other gimmicks to move through time, but throughout most of the movie the back part of my brain was occupied with trying to keep track of how much time had passed. So many important plot points occur offscreen that after every jump I really had to work to figure out what was going on. I wonder if we might have been better served by cheap visual clues. (Time passed similarly in Wit, but there was more audience hand-holding. Emma Thompson regularly broke the fourth wall to explain what was going on).
Ultimately, it hard to know what to make of Closer. The movie wants us to see it as a fatalistic commentary on the fickle nature of love and the impossibility of true happiness, and on those terms it really is quite good. As viewers, though, we're more concerned with the stories of the individual characters than with the film's intended message. Closer's incomplete portrayal of their relationships enhanced its overall message, but in doing so it dehumanized the characters to the point that we just couldn't care.