December 05, 2004

Closer

In a previous entry, I mentioned how much I loved a one-minute promotional spot for Mike Nichols' new movie, Closer. As expected, the full movie couldn't live up to the promise of the advertisement.

Closer can't shed its theatrical roots, which means the script provides four characters, with mix and match romantic entanglements, and presumably attempts to elicit some emotional response from the audience. I didn't really care about the characters and was only intellectually curious about what would happen to them, but it was still worth the ten bucks to watch, mostly for the acting. A few random observations:

1. Jude Law is surely a competent actor, but he is a tad boring. The sexiest man alive? He wasn't the sexiest man in this cast of, uh, two men.
2. Natalie Portman is now officially a grownup. She looks gorgeous and more holds her with all her castmates.
3. Julia Roberts seems effective in direct proportion to the amount of comedy in her roles. She's perfectly fine in Closer, but she doesn't shine the way she does in roles where she can flash her bicuspids.
4. Clive Owen is one of our great movie actors, and he demonstrates it in Closer. All three of the other actors have their best scenes with him, and that's the biggest compliment you can give to an actor. While there is a generic feel to all the characters (for which I blame playright/screenwriter Patrick Marber more than the other actors, Owen's Larry was the only one of the characters that I felt I truly knew at the end of the movie.