Closer review

Patrick Marber, who wrote both the screenplay and the original prizewinning stage play on which it was based, describes Closer as "a love story." Love, though, seems the very thing that's absent in this brilliantly written cynical condemnation of contemporary relationships. Instead it's the destructive elements connected with love - jealousy, deceit, obsession and betrayal - that are investigated.

"Where is this 'love'?" observes the damaged young Alice (Natalie Portman). "I can't see it. I can't touch it. I can't feel it." Trying to understand the elusive and complex nature of love is the essence of Closer, making it a film about love rather than a love story. Marber is less interested in the compassionate, tender aspects of relationships. He only concerns himself with those charged, exhilarating and crushing moments that bookend unions.

Director Mike Nichols has an innate ability to transmute plays to the screen as he's proved so successfully in the past with Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? and Angels In America. Here Nichols captures perfectly Closer's stark economy. The story of four people and their explosive inter-relationships plays out over a number of years, but the conveyance of time is done with a refreshing bluntness.

Frankness is a theme of Closer and never better illustrated than with Marber's incisive and vicious dialogue. The characters trade insults like scrapping hyenas fighting over a carcass. "You're judgmental." "You're devious." "You've ruined my life," they lob at each other. The lines are uttered with dispassionate venom. Their rawness is chilling. It's also too clinical and clever. While it's easy to applaud the writing, the dialogue seldom sounds genuine. The characters, all of whom speak in the same abbreviated manner, tend to come across more as vessels for Marber 's verbal dexterity than real people.

Set in London, the film centers on four characters. The carefree, but vulnerable young Alice, fresh in from New York where she worked as a stripper, bumps into Dan (Jude Law), an obituary writer and aspiring novelist. Their ensuing relationship comes unstuck when Dan encounters the more sophisticated, self-assured photographer Anna (Julia Roberts). Inadvertently Dan introduces Anna to the arrogant, manipulative dermatologist Larry (Clive Owen). All four then become embroiled in a ruthless maelstrom of emotions and torn alliances, fatefully confused as love.

There are few glimmers of light in this intense, dark drama, most are provided by the sparkly Portman. Owen's singular brand of detached smugness is better suited to the part of Larry, rather than Dan who he played in the original stage production. Roberts and Law are functional if not inspired in their charmless roles.

Closer is easier to admire than it is to enjoy. The characters are too self-serving and shallow to like, but as a clinical exploration of emotional frailty and with its use of truth as a weapon, it's masterful.

Kevin Murphy