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 "Closer" Chris' Review: "I love you, and I need a piss." That, right there, sums up the entire movie. Closer is a look at love where you don't normally get to see it. Closer is a brutally honest look at the disagreeable parts of relationships. Closer is a look at the painfully rough and imperfect traits in all human beings. It's a movie that focuses on the shit in relationships, almost completely forgoing any sort of real romance or what we traditionally look at as being love. It gives us the crude bits and ends up equating love and relationships with pain and suffering, lies and deceit. The question it makes you ask yourself... How much of this is true, how much of this is happening right now? Have I done this? Has someone done this to me? The movie started out with a couple of male characters that were just the bottom rung of romantic society, as I viewed them. It started out upsetting me that they were portraying men as such base characters and the women as just pawns to their game... until it became apparent, later in the movie, that often the people that seem the most innocent are the ones that are just better at playing the game and are, in fact, much much worse. In the end, the person that has seemed the most innocent throughout the whole movie, turns out to be the most deceitful, and deceitful in a debilitating deep way. Some devices that I found interesting were the lack of titles to denote time movement. You're left feeling kind of lost as you jump through time to the next occurrence in this tragedy of romance. As much as the characters in the movie are completely in the dark as to what freight train is about to hit them in the face, we, the audience, are in the same boat and are left unnerved by the jumping through time and the subsequent wreck that we see when we land. The director is very careful that each jump through time is forward... with only one exception. A single flashback scene involving Anna and Larry... and in my estimation, was allowed for the symbolic reason of Anna "backpedaling" in her relationship, regressing to the former lover, once and permanently. The movie was rife with meaning, but I don't dare to try to sues out any more of it on a single viewing. Don't worry, though, I will be seeing it again. The cast is, quite simply astounding. Alice (Natalie Portman), Dan (Jude Law), Anna (Julia Roberts), Larry (Clive Owen)... all of them turn in top notch performances. This is quite difficult for me to admit as I have, in past reviews, run rampant over the performance of Natalie Portman. In my opinion, she is one of the worse actresses in Hollywood today... but she did ok in this movie. Against the other three powerhouses, she wasn't great, but she did manage to hold her own, and as such I am admitting there may be more to Miss Portman than a lovely face. One performance that really stood out for me was Julia Roberts, again, not someone that I thought of as a "great" actress... but there were some nuances to her performance in Closer that really knocked me off my feet. I would love to mention specifics, but at the risk of spoilers, I'm going to respectfully request that you watch it for yourself. Overall, Closer, left a kind of sick taste in my mouth, to think that this is actually the way that most relationships develop, that this is the way that most relationships end... no fault to any one person, just a blind self-centeredness to each individual. A naive view of the grass is always greener. True or not, crass or honest, love or hate; Closer is a movie that will make you think and for that reason I give it 7 thumbs up, even though it was a painful viewing.   Jim's Review: BackHome - Info - Reviews - Map - Message Board - Photo Album |
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