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February 17, 2005
Closer
A week ago I saw Closer (spoiler warning: I'm assuming you've seen it), and now, appropriately distant, I feel objective enough to comment. The immediate critical consensus between my roommate and I was that 1) it's a deeply disturbing movie and 2) Natalie Portman is hot. Which she is, but I also think (he disagrees) that her Alice/Jane is the most compelling character of the four.
Each is a caricature of humanity in that each has certain sympathetic qualities which are joined by their opposites. Larry (Clive Owen), for instance, is driven by animalistic lust, but nevertheless has a certain boyish innocence about him, emotionally speaking. This latter emotional innocence is belied, however, by a masterful ability to emotionally manipulate other people. Anna (Julia Roberts), meanwhile, is introduced as a self-confident career woman/divorcée, but finds herself bouncing between Larry and Dan out of indecision and insecurity. She seems to thrive on feeling horrible about herself. In the end, Larry figures her out, and manipulates her back into marriage -- but not love -- with him, which only seems to show that those who fail to maintain concrete self identity are in danger of having it imposed from outside by the stronger willed. Or more manipulative. Dan (Jude Law), finally, is the most "romantic" of all the characters, but in his selfish quest for literary perfection in his own heart he hurts the other three more than anyone else.
Only Alice/Jane seems completely innocent of judgement, in my opinion; at least at first blush, she's the recipient of pain but not the source. Even at the end, I perceive her rejection of Dan more as justice for Dan's transgressions than unprovoked hurt. Yet even as we are set up to believe in the purity of her love for Dan at the beginning, her duplicitous identities raise the question: what, in her life, is actually real? Jane by night in England, Jane by day in America; Alice by day in England, perhaps Alice by night in America. Is one capable of feeling real love under those circumstances?
For this reason, I find her character compelling. The movie doesn't offer an answer to the question of Alice/Jane's love being real or not, perhaps inviting the audience to answer it for themselves. The other characters have judgement passed upon them by the script itself, which is, I think, a weakness.
So much for Closer's (limited) dramatic content. The rest of it seems to be driven forward by our lingering discomfort with the character's ability to maintain their opposites without somehow magically being driven from existence by their contradictions. Closer, that is, seems to be about shocking the audience with how "bad" the characters are, asking us to see them and identify with them as sympathetic people -- only to have our sympathy turned on its head in the next scene. This is why the movie is so deeply disturbing and gut-wrenching. But to the extent that it succeeds in doing so, the movie then fails: once we allow ourselves to identify with the characters, or with parts of the characters, Closer has little else to offer.
Portman's performance is the only one worth mentioning as stellar, although Clive Owen is adequate and even good at times. He's certainly given the best one-liners ("Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist covered with blood!" and "Thank you for your honesty. Now fuck off and die."). I've never been a big Jude Law fan; this is one of his better performances, but that's not saying much. And Julia Roberts is at her most stilted.
Posted by David Richmond at February 17, 2005 3:06 PM EST
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