By Scott Martin
Closer, USA / UK, 2004
Directed by Mike Nichols
Mike Nichols is a hard director to stomach sometimes. He has a way of making characters crawl under your skin, when that’s the very last place you want them. Such is the case, anyway, with the four characters in Closer, Dan (Jude Law), Alice (Natalie Portman), Anna (Julia Roberts), and Larry (Clive Owen). This is a film that assumes an old truth: look at a painting from far away, it’s perfect; look at it point blank, and you’ll see all the cracks and imperfections that destroy its image. Closer, like the characters who inhabit that truth, is one of those paintings, or maybe that holds true for photographs as well. The movie itself acts almost as a montage of snapshots and freeze-frames in these characters’ intersecting lives. Of course, if every picture is worth a thousand words, you know you’re in for a verbose screenplay. Thankfully, Patrick Marber adapts his own play for the film, which keeps the words intact. Read More