Closer (2004)

Crap that thinks it's clever...

This movie is not amoral or nihilistic or anything anyone has said in previous reviews. It has the depth of a soap opera and, sincerely, Dallas had better plot.
Take two hetero couples, all members white and almost all middle class, and then start talking about how mean we all are to each other because playing games is so much fun and yes, this is such a cruel world and relationships suck. Then find a number of good looking but totally anodyne actors and use a bad theatre play to make a pretty lame point.
The dialogue is crass and stylised, sounds phony and the characters seem to inhabit a world emotionally designed by Prada - yes, I suppose that is the point of the whole movie, but it fails precisely BECAUSE it fails to create anything remotely close to the icy beauty it sets out to achieve.
This is the cinematic equivalent of (faux)nu-metal: as depressing as a McDonald's meal and rid of any subtlety or shock.
The most telling part of the movie comes when Julia Roberts turns to Jude Law and tells his character that men are pigs and a caption underneath blurts "For your consideration", something which keeps happening in the movie. The encounter between the photographer (Julia Roberts) and the dermatologist (the other forgettable guy who is not Jude Law) proves another point: that the Internet is deceiving in matters of intimacy, that we idealise and judge without accurate knowledge and by now you only want to give the f***ing microwave to yourself for figuring it out already and being so f***ing clever!
This "stating the obvious" is a cultural phenomenon: movie audiences are no longer given any intellectual credit. We, the viewers, are treated like toddlers unable to analyse or engage in any ethical or emotional grey areas without being signalled that there is trouble ahead. Everytime something relevant or "controversial" comes up - don't you just love words like "controversial" and "irreverent" who seem to take every single obnoxious intention and co-opt it into acceptability? - a helpful caption comes up: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION. Yes, the movie is posing a problem, already obvious enough, and everyone is given a second chance to guess what the f*** is going on. Like, NOOOOOOOOOOOOO: we are UNABLE to figure it out, cuz we've just smoked too much WEEEEED DUUUDE and MTV screwed us out our of our WITS with TV shows by DA MAAAAN.
I mean, really! People! (In the movie and IRL...) GET A LIFE! But more than that: GET A BRAIN! Use it for something more than fawning over fey, untalented actors who live on this permanent PR produced sex appeal credit - how many times have you seen Jude Law on a (gay and non gay) magazine cover with the caption "Most beautiful man in the world" - and seem to build their careers playing characters who have the psychological complexity of an inanimate object.
I'm giving this movie one star because it is not a complete waste of time. It is an adaptation of a theatre play. If the adaptation is faithful to the play - I have not read it and am not very tempted to - then the movie is a perfect mirror of how bland, corporate and dim witted we have become. That critics and viewers alike go gaga over Law, the other guy who is supposedly too hot to trot and a script with dialogue written by a Victorian spinster trying to be naughty and cruel, then watch it kids. Do it so you can avoid the pitfalls of what general lack of talent means.

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