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Closer (2004)
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Movie Review by Bobby B
January 30th, 2008
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Not Close Enough
CAA-MMOOOONNN!!! I mean, are you for real? If this is supposed to be the ultra-hip, exciting and brutal romantic battleground that is supposed to be contemporary London does it have to be so boringly filmed? Apparently the only reason to make this play into a movie has to do with dollar signs. Mike Nichols has nothing to say with this script and his filming is brutally boring, flat and pedestrian. CLOSER is a play first which means there are a lot of "people talking". That does not mean that's all the movie has to be nor does it mean that if that is all there is that it's automatically going to work just because it's great writing. It's not great writing. The play wasn't great writing. It was thrilling when theatre audiences first encountered it and it felt raw. But without the sweat and energy of real actors the pretentiousness and stiltedness of the text becomes readily apparent and feels dated. A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE feels more immediate. Mike Nichols has a resume` the vast majority of film directors in the world would kill for. Yet he doesn't use the medium to tell the story in an interesting way let alone use the magic of cinema to discover something new in the text. There's no reason to make this a movie.
The casting is unimaginative. Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts are ostensibly perfect but neither (especially Portman) have the real world grounding to find the tragic beauty of their wounded characters. Portman, though beautiful (and you hate to see her cry) never makes you feel Alice's mystery, grit, heat, or that she would ever be a stripper. Nichols doesn't help her. The scene in the private room at the club is fraught with a different kind of emotional danger in the play. Here, it's just a man whining to a girl in skimpy clothes. There is no danger. Portman's Alice isn't selling sex, she isn't working for a living, she's acting.
Clive Owen and Jude Law should be all over their roles. But the shapelessness of most of their scenes flattens their performances. The scene in Larry's office is the only scene in the movie that comes close to the emotional stakes that the theatre experience raised and it makes the failure of the rest of the film that much more apparent.
These are not real people. The text dictates a kind of stylised realism, a poetic, artistic view of what's going on in the real world. Presenting that same script as though it is photographic reality is an aesthetic choice that undermines the strengths of the text and makes for a boring, pretentious movie.
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