Don V, they do in Hollywood!
Zia, I respect your opinion, but think you may have interpreted it in a way not intended by the director (not necessarily wrong).
My thoughts on what I consider one of the best films of 2004, after seeing it today:
Closer2004, Mike Nichols, US
Closer. An ironic title for a film lacking emotional appeal. By the end of the film, each of the four main characters, though two are finally together (again), are as emotionally distant as they have been physically intimate during the course of the film. The tone throughout is cold, forlorn, bleak and detached.
The opening and final shots are fittingly in slow motion; as the bustling streets walk toward the camera, heads and bodies bob up and down. And indeed, these are the lives of our four characters: highs and lows, ups and downs, whatever you want to call it, but far from even. It also seems odd that it is in these shots and these shots only, where the characters have any kind of intimate contact with society. Even when two sit on a bus in the first scene, they are at the back and, in conversing with one another, have detached themselves from the rest of the commuters.
Contemporary London. Obituary writer Dan (Jude Law) meets New Yorker Alice (Natalie Portman) when the latter is knocked over in the street. When they form a relationship, Dan falls in love with photographer Anna (Julia Roberts), who soon falls in love with dermatologist Larry (Clive Owen). These four’s lives intertwine through the film in a completely absorbing study of sex, passion, trust and betrayal.
There is a distinct lack of connection between the viewer and the characters in
Closer. As they struggle to hold onto each other for anything other than sex, each scene becomes more strained than the last, more distant, more desperate. Each of the four characters are given ample screen time, and all are drawn out with equal depth and contrasting roles to play. The transformations they unwittingly undertake are complex and profound, subtle and despairing, and equally unwitting are the audience, utterly absorbed as they watch the lives of these characters with grim fascination as they cleverly unfold.
A careful examination of not only physical intimacy (the only relationships in the film are strictly sexual, and love quickly becomes a cliché), but of truth and honesty, and how it affects the mind of someone and, perhaps more importantly, those around them. Apart from one instantly noticeable slice of bravura, where Dan asks Alice about her past and the bus passes under a bridge and plunges the whole scene into darkness, into the unknown, Nichols’ direction takes a stand back to observe the proceedings.
Instead, it is Patrick Marber, who adapted his own play of the same name, who is allowed to flourish and drive the film. The film relies heavily on conversation to conjure up its tone of yearning desperation, and Marber’s darkly witty script is filled with subtle irony, ferocious bursts of lust, and it drives the narrative from scene to scene with engrossing force. The narrative, about the interweaving lives of four very different people, ironically comprises a succession of disjointed scenes, each being detached from the next, with a considerable distance of time inbetween, just like the characters themselves.
Mick
