MOVIE REVIEW

In this emotionally bereft film, relationships are about manipulation and betrayal.

By Kenneth Turan, Times Staff Writer

Everything about "Closer" just about screams "adult." It's got Mike Nichols as director and four accomplished actors in the cast. It's got a play celebrated for a scabrous view of human relationships as source material and a hard R for "graphic sexual dialogue, nudity/sexuality and language" as a rating. It's all dressed up but, frankly, it's got nowhere of interest to go.

For what this investigation of four people obsessed with each other (and not in a good way) lacks is a compelling reason to see it. Despite involved acting from Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Clive Owen and Nichols' impeccable professionalism as a director, the end result is, to quote one of the characters, "a bunch of sad strangers photographed beautifully."

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"Closer's" difficulties start with the nature of the material, adapted by Patrick Marber from his play. Set in contemporary London, it gives us what 1960s soft-core virtuoso Radley Metzger called a lickerish quartet, two men and two women who compulsively lust after each other's partners.

It's not the sex they want, really, or even love, but the chance to manipulate and betray another human being, to play sadistic and demeaning head games with each other. The deception is brutal, and so is the language, as the partners taunt each other with vivid descriptions of their intimate encounters.

The point of all this, presumably, is to provide insight into the way we love now, to expose the reality behind people's puny desire to get closer. As a writer, Marber knows his way around banter, and his screenplay wants to contrast the pain of failed relationships with the glibness of repartee like: "I don't kiss strange men"/ "Neither do I" and "You've ruined my life"/ "You'll get over it."

While this combination might have worked on stage, where artificiality can be stimulating, it is a different story with the more naturalistic film medium. Though the film hungers for its characters to be taken seriously, that's hard to do. "Closer's" people are as icy as the ones in "The Polar Express," their emotional connections too carefully distanced to be involving. And their problems, despite being tricked up with explicit language and cybersex, are fake-adult rather than the real thing.

Mike Nichols puts these slippery characters through their paces with all the cool aplomb of a chess grandmaster, and that is part of the problem. For all his great skill and frequent success, Nichols can be a director who keeps his distance from genuine as opposed to theatrical emotion, which makes this bad situation worse. His version of "Closer" is all slick surfaces, a bauble polished to such a high gloss that finding an emotional handhold is impossible.

The performer who comes closest to melting all this permafrost is Natalie Portman, completely involved in the role of Alice, a youthful exotic dancer complete with fake fur coat and faker red hair. Alice has just blown into London from New York when she has a classic cute meet with Dan, played by Jude Law.

Dan describes himself as "sort of a journalist," someone consigned to the Siberia of obituary writing. He's diffident, she's direct, they're both photogenic, so a relationship is clearly in the offing.

At this early point "Closer" takes one of its several unannounced leaps forward in time, an intriguing technique that finally doesn't mean very much. It's a year or maybe two later, Dan and Alice are still together, and he is getting his author photo taken for a novel he's having published. The photographer is Anna (Julia Roberts), another American, and Dan, who seems to have a thing for Yanks, decides in an instant it's she he's madly in love with.

Soon enough, a nasty joke of Dan's inadvertently adds a fourth player to the mix, a dermatologist named Larry (Clive Owen) whose surface-obsessed profession is clearly not just coincidental. From then on it's duplicity, subterfuge and betrayal 24/7, as the film's characters continue to mistake self-involvement for passion and selfishness for love. It's not the search for truth that separates us from the animals, as one of the quartet insists, it's the complexity and conviction of our emotional lives. An understanding of that is what "Closer" so conspicuously lacks.

'Closer'

MPAA rating: R for sequences of graphic sexual dialogue, nudity/sexuality and language.

Times guidelines: Scathing sexual dialogue

Alice...Natalie Portman

Dan...Jude Law

Anna...Julia Roberts

Larry...Clive Owen

A Columbia Pictures presentation, in association with Inside Track, distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing. Director Mike Nichols. Producers Mike Nichols, John Calley, Cary Brokaw. Executive producers Scott Rudin, Celia Costas, Robert Fox. Screenplay by Patrick Marber, based on his play. Cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt. Editors John Bloom, Antonia Van Drimmelen. Costume designer Ann Roth. Production designer Tim Hatley. Supervising art director Mark Raggett. Set decorator John Bush. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes. In general release.