Pretty People and the Pretty People They Betray

Mike Nichols' new movie "Closer" one of the more brutal experiences you can have in the theatre in 2004. And in a year that gave us "Troy", "Alexander", and every other movie containing violence and blood and gore, that is saying quite a lot. But this movie's brutality doesn't involve physical injury. The bruises and scars that are inflicted in "Closer" are all on the inside, in the mind and in the heart and are all that much more difficult to get over.

The plot start simple but convolutes easily. Jude Law's Dan and Natalie Portman's Alice meet cute. Then a little while later, Dan meets Julia Roberts' Anna. After a terribly amusing online chat involving a mistaken identity, Anna ends up meeting Clive Owen's Larry. And then it all goes to hell. With betrayal upon betrayal, all in the name of love and happiness, the four of them hurt each other in ways that seem unimaginable during those first few moments of relationship bliss.

None of the characters are particularly or distinctly drawn. Here and there a bit of past, a hint of history is dropped to further the plot and possibly give a peek at motivation. But none of that is more than a fleeting glance and for the most part we are dealt the here and now with flashbacks only to the immediately pertinent. Battling for everyone's soul are the forces of truth and lies, each showing itself to be a vehicle capable of slamming down another person with precise and deadly intent. It is never clear which is more harmful, the truth or the lie and when Larry is given the truth he cannot comprehend that he has heard anything but the lies he is used to. Dan tries to lie out of guilt and then tells the truth out of guilt, both failing to provide him with the solace he seeks. Anna lies mostly to herself, everyone else is just collateral damage. Alice praises truth and her inability to deceive, but she might be the grandmaster of it all. In their own ways, each of these people is loved, hated and pitied--though not necessarily in that order. It is a credit to each of these actors that they are all fully believable at every stage. Using their beauty like weapons, all four actors shed the gleam of Hollywood and come across as fully fledged and fallible human beings.

At the heart of movie is the great question of love and how easily we as humans fall in and out of this overpowering emotion. It is never clear if the damage we can inflict on ourselves is more devastating than what we can do to the ones we love or loved. We often find ourselves questioning the very existence of love at the end of a relationship: Did he ever love me? Does he love me still? Did I ever really love him? But we tend to ask these questions only after the damage has been done and we are sitting amidst the smoking wreckage of what might have once been something beautiful. Dan and Alice and Anna and Larry play with each other's emotions out of the fear that admitting the depth and seriousness of how they feel. When they question each other and themselves as their relationships unravel, it is only out of self preservation.

The quite obvious and frequent betrayals go hand in hand with that question of love. Larry feels so betrayed by Anna he forces to her to recount for him moment by moment the sexual nature of her affair. Though she betrayed him with her body, he uses his love as his weapon and betrays her with his cruelty. And there is no lack of cruelty in this movie either. The pain and anguish that linger in the aftermath of these broken relationships has far reaching results, most of which we never even get to see.

This is not an easy movie. There are scenes of great levity, scenes of great and soft feeling, but one does not walk out of the theatre longing for their own next romantic encounter. We might be able to forgive - it elevates us above the rest of Nature - but forgetting is always something else.