 Starring: Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Jude Law, Natalie Portman
Director: Mike Nichols
Year Of Release: 2004
Plot: In 10 scenes set at the beginning and end of relationships, Dan meets stripper Alice, but becomes obsessed with Anna after she photographs him for a book he’s written and then rejects him. After Dan sets Anna up with Larry out of spite, the two get together and marry, but Dan still wants Anna. And on and on, as the four characters go through a revolving door of shagging each other, splitting up and getting back together. |
Films like Closer cause me mental trauma. Even now, five and a half years after it was made, I still can’t decide whether it’s a good movie or not. The dialogue is sharp, the performances excellent, but the whole thing leaves me cold and I can never work out whether it is just a giant load of bollocks, or if I’m missing something vital.
It’s the sort of film that gives me an inferiority complex, because superficially at least it looks like it should be really smart, full of clever ideas about modern relationships, so that I can stroke my chin while being engaged by the fascinating characters. However I can’t get past the fact that everybody in the film is an asshole. It’s a movie that really ought to be called ‘Unpleasant People Being Nasty To One Another For No Good Reason’, but I’d imagine that if you take a film called that to financiers, they’d quickly show you the door.
Part of the problem is the formal conceit of only showing you the first and last scene of each relationship. As a result you never know who these people are, so that whatever they do seems brutish and nasty, even when they’re embarking on a new love affair. The four main characters keep swapping partners, but you never really find out why everyone’s cheating, and the impression you get is that people will pretty much fuck anyone who asks, without a second thought. Men are led by their penises and while women hold the power to say yes and no, eventually they always say yes, no matter what else is going on in their lives. It’s hideously cynical, giving the impression that all human relationships are just about everybody shagging everybody else and then lying about it, or deciding to tell the truth so they can have a sharply written argument and then break-up.
It also fits into that rather charmless bracket of the arts that's largely about middle-class audiences getting pleasure out of seeing how horrible other middle-class people can be to one another, as if it's some sort of catharsis for any guilt they have over their social standing. It's almost as if by making movies about how miserable and awful middle class people are, they can feel better about having money. Hence why in a lot of films (which are generally made by the middle classes) poor people tend to be struggling but happy, but those with a bit of cash are invariably miserable, because it presents a nice, if fictitious, balance (although in Closer they don't bother with the happy poor people, and instead concentrate on miserable people with nice lifestyles).
Reading through some of the reviews for the film, it seems the people who liked it were those who’d had similar experiences in their own life. So perhaps I should just polish my halo and accept that I don’t get it because you can only like it if you’re an asshole yourself and recognise your own asshole-icity in the characters.
But then there’s always that sneaking suspicion that with slightly stagey, formally contrived films like this that get fairly well received but not ecstatically so, that it’s a bit of a case of the emperor’s new clothes. Could it be that a lot of people out there who’ve said nice thing about the film are only doing so because they too watched it and felt like they were missing something (which may or may not be there), but rather than admit that, thought they’d better give it some polite applause?
There are quite a lot of films like this, where you see other reviewers writing nice things, and you can’t help but feel even they don’t believe they’re telling the truth, but they don’t want to admit they didn’t ‘get’ the movie. It’s the fear that if you’re the one to say ‘this film is utterly pointless’ or, as in the case of Closer, a movie that’s a great experiment for the actors and director but tedious for an audience, that everyone will laugh at you and point out your intellectual inferiority. It’s the reviewer’s version of being back in secondary school.
It’s a pit that deliberately intellectual films are won’t to fall into, because rather than the film being judged on the story, character or acting, it’s about whether you’re smart enough to like it. The result is that a quite a few movies that aren't very good get far more praise than they ought to, simply because everyone’s too afraid to say the emperor has no clothes. To be fair, this isn’t the actors or filmmakers fault (although I have seen directors blaming the audience for being too stupid, rather than accepting their movie might be flawed), it’s more the terms that critics and poncey filmgoers set up for the film. It's suggesting that to criticise these movies is to admit your own weaknesses rather than the film’s, whether that's a fair thing to say or not.
However, to give Closer its dues, because of its conceit of being pretty much 10 vignettes, some of these sequences are far better than other. The scene with Clive Owen and Natalie Portman in a strip joint is brilliant, with fantastic performances and a very sharp dissection of sexual politics. In fact it’s so good that it makes the rest of the movie seem even more disappointing.
That said, it’s difficult to get round the fact that the rest of the film is largely unlikable people being nasty to one another in contrived set-ups, which seem to have more to do with showing off modern cynicism and trying to be clever, rather than reflecting real life. But hey, maybe I just go round wearing rose-coloured glasses, and ignore it when people say things like “Now fuck off and die, you fucked up slag” to me (as Clive Owen says to Julia Roberts in one of their friendlier exchanges). It is a shame though, as director Mike Nichols has made some brilliant looks at the dynamics of sex and relationships in the likes of Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and Carnal Knowledge, but with Closer he seemed to have lost his touch and gotten too clever for his own good.
However, by saying that, does that mean I’ve now admitted I’m an idiot whose opinions should be dismissed because I’m not smart enough to get the film, or is it just fair comment?
TIM ISAAC
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