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| Liars:
(l-r) Owen, Portman, Roberts and Law in Closer. |
Rotten
Bastards
By
Shawn Stone
Closer
Directed by Mike Nichols
Attention moviegoers: Hollywood has delivered another Christmas
miracle. Last year, the usual saccharine cinematic offerings
were spiritually offset by Bad Santa, the meanest,
vilest, out-Grinching-the-Grinchiest holiday movie ever. It
seemed foolish to hope that something so wonderful would happen
again, but it has. While Mike Nichols’ Closer is not
a holiday movie, it’s the meanest, nastiest break-up-with-your-partner-after-seeing-it
flick ever released at Christmastime. Although Closer
doesn’t come within a mile of being as fine a movie as Bad
Santa—partially because Nichols is the director—no
matter. Closer is as cold and treacherous as an icy
road. Any Julia Roberts fans expecting to see a pleasant evening
of attractive people caught up in typical romantic complications
will feel like they’ve hit a patch of ice and been sent flying
off I-787 into the Hudson River.
(Special note to Roberts’ fans: The dialogue is often quite
filthy. Deliciously filthy, however.)
The film opens with Alice (Natalie Portman) and Dan (Jude
Law) locking eyes on a crowded London street. She swoons and
he flirts. She walks toward him, straight into traffic, and
is hit by a taxi. He takes her to hospital, and a romance
is born. The filmmakers are nothing if not up front about
what they feel is the main side effect of sexual attraction:
pain.
The other couple in this battle of the sexes are Anna (Roberts),
a professional photographer, and Larry (Clive Owen), a dermatologist.
If pain brings together Alice and Dan, then the Cupid who
unites these two is an obscene monster. (Even though this
nasty bit of business is only a comic harbinger of what’s
to come.) The roundup: Alice loves Dan; Dan loves Alice, but
also Anna; Anna loves Larry, but also Dan; and Larry loves
Anna. Oh, and Alice and Larry may or may not have had sex,
too.
These are moderately likable people who behave with appalling
selfishness. Hearts and lives are broken with shocking ease
and absence of conscience. The biggest mystery for the audience,
in fact, is in trying to figure out which of the quartet is
the most loathsome. What makes Closer compelling, however,
is the naturalism at the heart of its essential emotional
brutality. We’ve all known people like this; we’ve all been,
to greater or lesser degrees, people like this.
Roberts, Owen and Law rise to the occasion quite nicely, and
Portman, while still unsure of herself much of the time, is
convincing during her character’s most important scenes. (She’s
even a good stripper.)
Closer
does, as noted, have its flaws. Patrick Marber adapted his
own play, and while the dialogue and individual scenes are
powerful and convincing, the overall story is much too slick
and schematic. Nichols, as usual, doesn’t help matters either;
he’s been directing films since 1966 and still has moments
when he clearly doesn’t know where to put the camera.
There is, however, nothing in theaters right now remotely
like Closer. It’s so out of the mainstream it’s scary.
In a good way.
Brain
Men
Primer
Directed by Shane Carruth
Can a cell phone ring in two different dimensions? That’s
the smallest of the conundrums presented in Primer,
a cautionary tale about causality that was inspired by the
history of calculus. A popcorn movie it’s not, but Primer,
which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, is intensely,
intricately intriguing, with a well-developed internal logic
far beyond the range of the average experimental film.
Written, directed, and edited by Shane Carruth for $7,000,
Primer has the look of a high-end home movie, which
it basically is (it was shot in Super 16 mm). But the grainy,
ultra-realistic visuals suit it perfectly. In a detached garage,
Aaron (non-actor Carruth) and Abe (amateur actor David Sullivan)
tinker obsessively with a new invention they refer to simply
as “the device.” A diamagnetic superconductor of sorts, the
device contains an error with bizarre implications, and the
two engineers work around the clock to bring this quirk to
its full, unknown potential. Having already shut out two colleagues
to ensure the purity of their mission, Aaron and Abe discuss
in minute, scientific detail the ramifications of the untried
path they are blazing. Their mundane surroundings, the anonymity
of their button-down shirts and ties, and the casual drone
of their brainiac jargon all serve to prime the audience to
accept the mind-boggling capability of the device, which Abe
discovers after putting his watch in the box.
The device is moved to a storage unit as the engineers become
wary of any outsiders sharing in their discovery. This mistrust
is based on the belief that the potentialities would be too
heavy for anyone to absorb right off the bat (“The permutations
are endless,” says Abe, and Primer ingeniously proves
him right). Eventually, their mistrust extends to each other
and causes a dangerous fracture. Even more compelling than
how Primer shifts from quantum physics to existential
quandaries is the realization that the technical skill of
the young engineers is without an ethical foundation.
The utter naturalism of the acting, and the occasionally inspired
cinematography (Carruth does a lot with very little; ditto
for his minimalist score) were the result of extensive storyboarding
and long rehearsals. But because of the filmmaker’s familiarity
with the material, he may not have realized that some of his
storytelling shorthand is too short: The audience shouldn’t
have to puzzle out which of the engineers is married, and
which one has a girlfriend with a wealthy father, and whether
that father was drawn into the discovery. At the same time,
the voice-over, spoken in a flatlined monotone by a witness,
is more annoying than clarifying. But these are small quibbles
for a cerebral feat whose most interesting element isn’t so
much what it’s about, but how it makes you think about what
it’s about.
—Ann
Morrow
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