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Film
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Closer
Lucky for us that with old age usually comes a little bit more empathy, as 73-year-old filmmaker Mike Nichols manifests this tendency with his second consecutive stunning play adaptation.
Friday, December 3, 2004
By Brett Buckalew
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Columbia Pictures
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Dan (Jude Law)
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When thinking of the most evocative movie openings of all time, one that springs instantly to mind is the beginning of Mike Nichols’ counterculture classic The Graduate. As Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” plays on the soundtrack, communicating a sense of futility (“But my words like silent raindrops fell/And echoed in the wells of silence”), doubt-plagued, young Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) lurks at the edge of the frame while an airport walkway moves him forward as if against his will. With just this combination of image and sound, we immediately get the sense of someone being rushed into a future he has no control over.
While it may be too soon yet to say whether the first scene of Closer will have as lasting an impact on the American pop-cultural consciousness, what’s undeniable is that it finds Nichols working a very similar, positively chill-inducing alchemy. As Dan (Jude Law) locks eyes with Alice (Natalie Portman) while waiting to cross a bustling London intersection, the moment is caught in lush slow-motion, as the wistful melancholy of Damien Rice’s “The Blower’s Daughter” provides musical backdrop. Rice’s bittersweet acceptance of an imperfect reality (“And so it is/The shorter story/No love no glory/No hero in her skies”) is reflected in the film when a speeding truck veers into the intersection and hits Alice, interrupting her silent flirtation with Dan, but not ending it, as Dan then comes to her rescue.
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Columbia Pictures
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Anna (Julia Roberts)
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Beyond the fascination that the stylistic similarities of these two openings exert is the richness of their difference in maturity. The moody, youthful sense of alienation in The Graduate opening signals the film to be the deeply felt work of a young man, which it indeed turns out to be. In contrast, the sad, knowing joke within the Closer beginning - that moments of bliss in life are fleeting, while the connections we make to other people last forever - sets the rest of the film up to be a reflection on love’s wild unpredictability from an older man, one who has lived long enough to savor the sweet-and-sour flavor of existence. And, to paraphrase Damien Rice, so it is.
To be sure, Nichols has always been one of the most profoundly human-centered of American filmmakers. Whether in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carnal Knowledge, Silkwood, or last year’s towering masterwork Angels in America, he has always had a keen sense of the kind of awkward friction that accompanies any kind of emotional intimacy between two people in love.
But to understand why Angels and, now, Closer are such unique achievements, one need only contrast their warm, compassionate wisdom with the sometimes chilly detachment of Nichols’ earlier work. In fact, the premise of what is arguably Nichols’ nastiest (if still utterly brilliant) movie, Carnal Knowledge - the cruel sexual games played by two unhappy couples - is directly mimicked by Closer, but, this time, it’s executed with an unmistakable empathy for people who are turned into mercurial, possessive beasts by sex. In other words, an empathy for all people.
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Columbia Pictures
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Larry (Clive Owen)
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Dan, an obituaries writer, ends up spending a charmed day with Alice after she is treated for only minor wounds suffered from the accident. But writer Patrick Marber, adapting his own dazzlingly insightful play, is smart enough to hint at Dan’s insecurities in this otherwise carefree meeting between Dan and Alice. “Look at your little eyes,” Alice observes after telling Dan she used to be a stripper, and, sure enough, Dan’s peepers are spinning.
Cut to over a year later, and Dan has written a book about Alice, who is now his girlfriend. His attachment to Alice, however, doesn’t keep him from hitting on Anna (Julia Roberts), the saucy but clearly wounded photographer who takes his book-jacket picture.
After being rejected by Anna, Dan diabolically pretends to be her on an Internet instant-message service, engaging in a heated online encounter with dermatologist Larry (Clive Owen), the kind of man whose brain and libido are equally gigantic. But Dan’s ruse backfires when Larry meets Anna, and the two end up getting married.
Through emotionally charged encounters too complex to describe, and too rewarding to give away, these two couples start pinballing off of each other in increasingly hurtful ways. Beginning with Anna’s agreement to an affair with Dan, a kind of emotional war follows, one depicted with more realistic intensity than many actual wars in literal combat films.
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Columbia Pictures
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Alice (Natalie Portman)
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It would be a discredit to Marber to claim that all of the movie’s success in making these struggles so witty, moving, and relatable lies on Nichols’ shoulders. The writer is especially good at precise, bullet-like lines of dialogue that capture the silliness and tragedy of being brutally honest with your partner. For example, when Larry interrogates Anna about the particulars of sex with Dan, she understandably asks why it’s so important. ‘Because I’m a f*cking caveman!’ is Larry’s quick response, and the openness of the confession is poignant, funny, and scary all at once.
But it’s Nichols who makes the dialogue-driven narrative gorgeously come alive as cinema. He and director of photography Stephen Goldblatt have a subtly stunning command of composition, and their focus on Anna’s photographic work self-reflexively questions whether the visual arts can adequately communicate a person’s being.
The answer of course is yes, and it’s proven by the amazing central quartet here, whose four attractive mugs have never been as expressive as they are here. When any one of them is caught in close-up, it’s always to register some minute flicker of feeling. And, in a nice touch, Nichols allows Law’s and Owen’s constantly shifting amount of beard growth to signify the levels of primitiveness and self-loathing that Dan and Larry reach at varying points in the story.
Needless to say, there are more to the performances than uncanny facial reactions. Law has played many womanizing golden boys, but never one as obviously needy as Dan, and the actor is fearless in conveying the character’s desperation. Roberts is at her most subtle, and somehow her quiet regret is far more forceful than the loud bubble-headedness she falls back on too often in many of her more big-budget star turns. Owen plays many delightful, unpredictable notes as Larry, making him as playful and charming as he is sinister and brutish; he offers the kind of effortless intricacy that great screen acting is all about.
But it’s Portman who gives the most undeniably touching, and surprising, performance. An actress who had previously shown a woefully limited range (Attack of the Clones, anyone?), she had expanded her gifts impressively in Cold Mountain and Garden State. But nothing she’s done before could prepare viewers for how alive, nuanced, raw, real, and just plain heartbreaking she is as Alice.
One of the many ambitious themes that Nichols and Marber explore in Closer is the ongoing battle in one’s adulthood to love oneself as easily as you can love another person. If you can treasure your lover’s flaws, why can’t you forgive your very own?
| It may seem surprising that the film’s youngest character, Alice, is, from the very beginning, the most self-aware about the importance of winning this interior battle. But as an older, thoughtful filmmaker, Nichols clearly relishes the resilience of youth. It’s easy to wonder what he would do in this present stage with a story like Rumor Has It, the Rob Reiner project currently filming with Jennifer Aniston starring as the possible offspring of The Graduate romance.
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But it’s even easier to just sit back, stop speculating, and just enjoy a master in his prime.
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