Closer

Closer is a complete mess. There's nothing so clever about the contrived plot, the characters are abhorrently inconsistent and histrionic, and the transitions are as abrupt as they are unexpected, not to mention the emotions are all wrong. Characters burst into heartrending tears or fall madly in love or give up hopes they so dear at overly dramatized moments that even the most forgiving part of me had a hard time suspending my disbelief. The writer and the director choked the plot with all that have already been said or mused about relationships in an attempt to philosophize sex and love, but they're no philosophers, much less observant persons (heard that it's actually a play-turned-movie, but it is all the same). It's as if they tore pages out of a bunch of pulp romances and stitched them back together on the silver screen. It's such a sore sight!

I know people who cheat in their relationships, some even enjoy playing heartbreakers and all, but they are saints in comparison with the characters in Closer! Their dispositions and actions are just so over-the-top and unbelievable. Some may say the director is shooting for "realism" or "the brutality of truth" or whatever high-sounding gibberish one cares to conjure up, but at the end of the day, Closer's nothing more than a lousy soap opera about four miserable souls: A prick who cares only about sex, a loser who, coincidentally, cares only about sex, a fake who leads multiple lives with a penchant for drama, and a confused who acts now and regrets later. The stereotyping of the two sexes is unrelenting: Men crave sex more than anything and women are victims in general. Dan said, towards the end of the movie, that "without truth, we're animals". But god forbidden, show me a decent human being here! Closer should be renamed as "National Geographic Present: The Mating Urge of Unscrupulous Homo Sapiens", in which nothing gets in the way of a good fuck, not even love.

Performance wise, the cast does bring a lot to the table and is the only saving grace of this piece of highbrow garbage. Clive Owen, shedding his silly Arthurian armor, is definitely in his element playing Larry the misanthropic, manipulative and hotheaded jerk. Natalie Portman brings to her character the complexity required and then some, despite the half-hearted pole dance. Julia Roberts delivers Anna's subdued emotions of a self-victimized woman with incredible restraint and precision that it's almost like music. Jude Law plays Dan, the most uninteresting character in the mix, and thus comes off flat and forgettable (the last time he did a good job is in a brilliant sci-fi called Gattaca, which apparently nobody cares to see). Closer does remind me of one thing: If we admit people fall in love by pure chance (like Dan and Alice, and Anna and Larry in the movie), then whether a relationship can last or not is also a matter of chance or probability. In other words, you can't do much about your relationship. How sad.