As I grow older, I feel more and more frequently that like Lewis Carroll's Alice, I've gone some kind of rabbit hole and emerged into some bizarro universe that makes me wish I'd taken fewer drugs when I was a teenager. Oh, wait a minute....I didn't TAKE any drugs when I was a teenager. Oh, sure, there were a few doobies in my early 20's, but that was about it. No, alas, there's no one to blame for my warped perceptions than myself.

Or maybe George W. Bush. For there's nothing more surreal than watching the President of the United States, and his theocratic disciples, having apoplexy at the idea that gay men and women might want nothing more than to dress up, have a big party, and have some guy in a robe say some words which, when combined with a signature on a piece of paper, means you suddenly have inheritance rights and can visit each other in the hospital when you're sick, as well as the stew of jealousy, boredom, flickers of renewed passion, close friendship, and just plain comfort that a lifetime commitment brings you. I mean, what could be more of a threat to the Sanctity of the Family than people who really want a state-sanctioned commitment? After all, it's not like heterosexuals have done such a well job of effective coupling.

No one knows this fact better than director Mike Nichols, who has been arguably the sociological Alfred Kinsey of the dynamics of couples ever since directing the screen version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 1966, starring the most dysfunctional couple of all time, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. From there he went on to study meaningless intergenerational sex in The Graduate (1968), men behaving badly in Carnal Knowledge (1971), middle-aged narcissist couples of the Nora Ephron/Carl Bernstern sort in Heartburn (1986), scary power-women and how unable they are to couple in Working Girl (1988), brain-damaged coupling in Regarding Henry (1991), hot interspecies werewolf coupling in Wolf (1994), political coupling in Primary Colors (1998), and has even dabbled in studies of gay coupling, from the family-friendly and tame The Birdcage (1996) to Angels in America (2003).

In CLOSER, adapted by Patrick Marber from his stage play, Nichols studies four people who pass through each other's orbit, coupling and uncoupling until very little is left of any of them. Unlike, say, Neil LaBute, who tends to create villains of unparalleled odiousness (most notably Aaron Eckhart's Chad in In The Company of Men and Del Sizemore in Nurse Betty) and fragile flower victims, no one here is terribly likeable and all are incredibly self-indulgent, even those old enough to know better.

Jude Law is Dan, a frustrated author trapped in a soulless job writing newspaper obituaries, who has a brief moment in the sun as his novel is published, and then fails. Natalie Portman is his longtme live-in girlfriend, Alice, whom he meets cute as she is hit by a taxicab and who works intermittently as a stripper. Alice is a kind of punkette Holly Golightly, with all of the Audrey Hepburnesque gaminity and none of the charm. As young as she is, Alice is as brittle as ribbon candy and not nearly as sweet. It's easy to see Dan falling for her looks, as Portman is about the closest thing to Audrey Hepburn's beauty as we've seen in recent years, but there's not much else redeeming about her.

Julia Roberts is Anna, a photographer who meets Dan during a photo shoot, and succumbs rapidly to his charms. He is, after all, Jude Law, and who wouldn't? Dan, meanwhile, acts out his obsession with Anna by pretending to be her on a cybersex web site, piquing the interest of dermatologist Larry (Clive Owen), who has his own Meet Cute with Anna when he appears at the local aquarium and she just happens to be there.Larry ultimately wins Anna by marrying her, but then the real mischief begins, as these four people dance around each other. Damage was the name of a film a few years back in which Jeremy Irons had a disastrous affair with his son's fiance, but it would be a far more apt title for this film, in which everyone is damaged, and no one ends up any closer.

CLOSER is a treat, if a film as sour as this can be called such a thing, for those enamored of fine performers speaking literary, if sometimes preposterous language. I never thought I'd live to see the day when I would say this, but Julia Roberts is actually showing signs of becoming an interesting actress. Everything about Roberts has always been larger than life -- the hair, the teeth, the smile, the eyes, the legs, the reputation, the hype. As an actress, she's rarely been called on to do much more than look fetching and flash those pearly whites -- something she doesn't do here, Anna being a prickly sort. Yet if this is her quietest performance, it's also her most real. Although obviously photographed through filters, with a complexion that looks nary a day older than that of the 23-year-old Portman, she's developing a kind of almost Garbo-like inscrutability, and here shows the kind of world-weariness that a character with two failed marriages behind her and nary a clue as to what went wrong in either one would have. She's brittle, cynical, and seems far more comfortable discussing the sugar level in the semen of one man vs. another's than we would have expected Roberts to ever be, for all that she made her big splash playing the world's most squeaky-clean prostitute. Yet as spare as this performance is, Roberts lets us in just enough to see the brick wall that disappointment has built around Anna's heart, as well as the longing to break it down that she has.

Natalie Portman, freed from the lugubrious direction of that hack George Lucas, is once again the formidable talent we first saw in The Professional. She's incredibly beautiful, even if it is "the moronic beauty of youth", as Larry refers to her, but she strikes just the right balance of waifishness and toughness. Jude Law fares somewhat less well as the caddish Dan. Part of the problem is that we really have seen far too much of him this year, and Dan is really a less charming version of his Alfie. He's also beginning to seem more aware of the allure that comes with being one of the best looking people on the planet, and that seems to be affecting his performances. It's not a bad performance, and Dan isn't the meatiest character in the world, but it does make one want to say "Enough already...give someone else a chance." His fey beauty makes him no match for the formidable Clive Owen in their Big Confrontation Scene, perhaps because the latter originated the role of Dan on stage and so he knows Dan all too well. But Law is so overmatched that Dan just comes across as a sniveling whiner when confronted. I would have liked to have seen what someone like Christian Bale would have made of this role. Bale going mano-a-mano with Clive Owen -- now that I would have paid to see.

If the film belongs to anyone, it's Clive Owen. Anyone who saw Owen in Croupier has been baffled for the last few years as to why on earth this man is not yet a Major Star. With lupine good looks that are reminiscent of what Nicolas Cage would look like if he were handsome, blazing and incisive blue eyes, and a riveting physicality on screen, this guy has charisma to spare. In a scene which marks the turning point of the picture, Owen as Larry circles Alice like an animal playing with its prey, only to find that the prey is far more wily than he thought. He lends this scene a ferocity that makes the menace of his character palpable and makes Portman's performance and character that much stronger as well.

The film requires a certain amount of concentration, since it obviously skips back and forth in its timeframe, with no warning to the audience. If screenwriter Marber doesn't develop his characters all that well, it's because his screenplay isn't about the people, none of whom are particularly likeable, but about what they do to each other. He understands the differing perspectives men and women bring to the concept of infidelity. Women want to know "Do you love her more than me?", while men want to know, "Was he better in bed than me?" He also alludes briefly to the almost homoerotic charge between men competing for the same woman. That Dan and Larry have their first encounter dancing around cybersex in an anonymous chat room drives home, perhaps a bit too obviously that sometimes fucking another man's woman is a socially acceptable way to fuck the man himself. Perhaps that's why people seem to leave the theatre with such confused expressions on their faces.

-- Jill Cozzi

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