Closer: Mike Nichols Carnal Knowledge II?

 

Closer (2004)

Directed by Mike Nichols

Columbia Pictures, 104 minutes, R (nudity, sex, adult situations)

★★★

 

 

Director Mike Nichols died in 2014. He excelled as a Hollywood auteur who probed identity issues and the complexities of adu
lt life, as he did in Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966) and The Graduate (1967). In 1971, he waded into the destructiveness of lust in Carnal Knowledge, a film considered scandalous in its day for its unbridled discussions of sex. In numerous ways, Closer is Carnal Knowledge II set three decades later.

 

On a crowded London street, novelist Dan Woolf (Jude Law with hair) notices an alluring dye-job redhead smiling as she walks toward him. Their eyes lock a moment too long and she is knocked down by a vehicle. She is bruised and bleeding; Woolf (note the surname) hails a cab and takes her to the hospital. She’s an American stripper who gives her name as Alicia Ayres (Natalie Portman). Soon the two are living together, though Alicia is younger and innocent, her occupation notwithstanding.

 

Dan has a roving eye, however. At a book jacket photo shoot he puts the moves on shutterbug Anna Cameron (Julia Roberts). She’s married, but nonetheless passionately kisses Daniel. He also enjoys trolling online sex chat rooms, where he poses as a woman and revels in his puppet-string power over men on the other end. That’s how dermatologist Larry Gray (Clive Owen) enters the picture. Dan tells Larry his name is “Anna” and arranges a rendezvous the next day at the aquarium. It’s a sick setup as he knows that Anna Cameron will be there. After an awkward approach, Larry and Anna chat and are attracted to each other. Fast forward and Anna is divorced and married to Larry.

 

Don’t expect syrupy endings from Mike Nichols. Closer is a double pas de deux in which Dan pursues Anna, Larry pursues Alicia, marriages are made and broken, and the cycle repeats. Dan and Larry are soon trapped in a don’t love the one you’re with game; when one is with Anna he longs again for Alicia and vice versa. If it seems a dirty male fantasy, don’t jump to conclusions. Nichols lets no one off the hook, so it’s never clear who is calling the shots, who is a willing victim, or who is crossing whom. Alicia, for instance, does seem a child at times–Larry says as much–but then again, in between partners she bares it all in a sex club and acts like a polite dominatrix.

 

In essence, everything and everybody looks one way on the surface, but might be something else altogether. Nichols cleverly parallels the narrative with two pieces of soundtrack music, Mozart’s 1790 opera Cosí fan tutte and Damien Rice’s “The Blower’s Daughter.”  Mozart’s work translates “so do they,” by which he meant women. So do they what? Exactly! “The Blower’s Daughter” is an enigmatic song about a woman who is a clarinet teacher who also works in a call center. A little Freud anyone?

 

Closer was a hit with critics and did well at the box office because it rolled out when Julia Roberts was at the peak of celebrity fame. Audiences were more tepid in their post-viewing assessment of the film because it is, to say the least, not exactly an endorsement of healthy relationships. Marketers also erred in labeling it a romantic drama. There’s plenty of drama, but are we watching romance or simply the fulfillment of lust du jour?  

 

Roberts and Owen shine brightly in the film, with Portman a small step behind. When the camera zooms in on her face, Roberts is absolutely luminous. She also casts an air of a woman in charge–even when she’s not. Owen is at his arch best and brandishes words as if they were an eviscerating sword. Law, though, is arguably too whiny and wimpy to be fully convincing when he tries to turn Machiavellian.

 

The film suffers at times from being more antiseptic than appealing­–as if Nichols is dissecting the psyches and egos of four intensely unlikable people. There are so many ulterior motives that it could be seen as a tale of four adrift amatorcultists. The film’s ending is a riff off that The Usual Suspects, which came out a decade earlier.

 

If you have seen Carnal Knowledge, consider Closer a companion piece. If you’ve not, watch them both for their ensemble acting. Then take a shower!

 

Rob Weir