Through the Aquarium Glass: A Digression into Theatricality out of Mike Nichols’ "Closer"
24 July 2005
If appearances make the movie, Mike Nichols’ Closer can be slingshot to the front of the line of current films: it is hard to pick a more cinematically gorgeous cast than Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen, and the recently crowned "Sexiest Man Alive," Jude Law. For the less virile tastes, Closer is also a beautifully constructed film, with expert handling of a dialogue-heavy narrative that harkens back to the films director Nichols cut his teeth on: The Graduate (1967) and Carnal Knowledge (1971) (Who can see Closer’s aquariums without seeing Ben Braddock through the Nicholsian glass?). Moreover, it provides another example of what Nichols is best at: the extroverted discussion of sex.
Unfortunately for those of the less virile tastes, their tastes might have had them heading for the doors before the glory of Nichols’ filmmaking really kicked in. At least, that’s what happened to a friend of mine who, prior to my viewing, said she hated the film and had to keep herself from walking out.
Closer is vulgar. Let’s not mince words, it is downright disgusting. But it is digusting in the way that truly disgusting blood-and-guts films wish they could be, i.e. there is a reality to Clive Owen’s sexual forwardness that is first real and second enviable. His degradation isn’t simply blood and guts, or vulgar sex, or pain and torture – the kind of degradation that comes ten a penny in Hollywood films these days. It is a chance meeting on the street with a man you never wished you wouldn’t meet. It is exciting, and, as Owen repeatedly reminds us in the film, it is honest, and that is something we rarely see.
Such is the reason Closer is daring – or perhaps more accurately, the reason Patrick Marber’s play upon which the film is based was daring enough to be filmed. The dialogue of Closer is a striking audible reality the way David Thewlis’ unending London night in Mike Leigh’s Naked was a striking visual plague: a grotesque image of honesty and singularity that we the audience are seldom forced confront but can’t stand to ignore. And such honesty is hard to write. After all, A. O. Scott’s review of the film in the New York Times suggests Marber’s dialogues are unlikely and his characters improbable at best. But at least Mr. Marber is trying something uncommon. Not "new," uncommon.
Meanwhile, the review of Closer on IMDB.com at 6:25 pm EST, 19 December, 2004, written by one "noralee" of Queens, NY, summarizes the film as "Hollywood stars using lacerating words as sexual weapons." In my experience, the reviews that show up on IMDB and any other public online source are 90% of the time negative because (a) everyone’s a critic and (b) only the people with strong feelings against a particular work feel the need to sit down for hours to warn people against that thing. If you like a piece of artwork, you generally pat someone on the back and say, "Hey, what a nice piece of artwork, let’s get a beer" or you whisper similar sentiments in the car ride home, but unless you’re getting paid, you don’t sit down to write in praise of something. Unless you’re me. I digress. I’m just saying praise is not as much fun as ridicule and the point of that is, I rarely give the IMDB reviews a second thought. I only mention this one to highlight two things: (1) It shows the total dissolution of the writer to the current film audience that this review faults the actors, rather than the author, for word choice, and (2), more importantly, the word "Hollywood." I mention "Hollywood" – that disgusting, vile word loosely defined as a factory for making sequels – because, despite the use of Hollywood big wigs like the current man-in-every-film Jude Law, Julia Roberts, and Natalie Portman (yes, the use of "wig" there was an intentional pun, but not very well constructed one), Nichols’ film is anything but Hollywood.
Simply, no tradition of dialogue exists in Hollywood cinema. One might be able to cite Linklater – Slacker (1991), Before Sunrise (1995) and its sequel Before Sunset (2004) – or My Dinner with Andre (1981, directed by Frenchman Louis Malle) for conversational American filmmaking, but four is hardly a tradition and the unremarkable public response to each suggests a less than sustainable legacy.
I mentioned Mike Leigh earlier purposefully: Closer is a dialogue driven film in a more European tradition, a tone more referential to Goddard and Renoir and Stanislavsky than to anything America has put into celluloid. Nichols molds that same tone, which was borrowed by Leigh and Cassavetes (an American) and which has yet to appeal to an American audience (Cassavetes proved that, where has his American cinema verite gone?).
Closer fits into another genre, that of the play filmed. It is an arena that has brought success – Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992) – and failure – The Big Kahuna (John Swanbeck, 1999) and a few of Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespearean remakes. That friend who nearly walked out called Closer’s dialogue wooden, theatrical, like she was listening to a play. Would have she liked it better had she seen the play staged, I wonder? Would she have nearly walked out then? My impression of our dinner conversation a la Closer is that yes, she would have, which suggest to me not a problem of "wooden" dialogue but again of taste. Toward the vulgarity, yes. But also toward a theatrical interchange that is somewhat unbeknownst to modern filmmaking, except for Glengarry Glen Ross and The Big Kahuna and Love’s Labour’s Lost (Branagh, 2000).
Of course, my friend is not alone. A. O. Smith found Closer’s scenes flawed, the intensity "misplaced." "Larry, Dan, Alice and Anna seem to find themselves in a constant state of emotional extremity, in part because the quiet, everyday moments of their lives have been pruned away, but for precisely that reason their tears and rants seem arbitrary and a little absurd." Further, "They exist only from moment to moment and only in relation to one another." I might ask Mr. Smith to suggest a film in which the quiet everyday moments mattered to the climax of the story. Are not memories based upon emotional extremity? Again, here is taste. Here is theatricality. To Smith, Closer seems made up, i.e. theatrical.
And really, theatricality in dialogue is a hard thing to get rid of when adapting a stage play directly for the screen. It is a painful process that relies on the strength of the original word combining with the strength of the new found artistic palette of the motion picture. And where Marber’s words falter or fail – the cliched child-like stripper, perhaps – Nichols and his cast does admirably to succeed.
Yet, I’d like to suggest something more, in relation to Closer and the play on which it is based. I did not get distracted by the words, I did not question the actors or their probable-ness. In fact, I found them engaging, admittedly hard to like toward the end, but hardly misplaced or zealous. It suggests to me a virtue of playwriting, first proving that story is the bedrock of good filmmaking, but also that those films that refuse to get rid of the theatricality, the structure, and dare I say the "wooden"ness of staged dialogue deserve to be remembered for exactly that: their theatre, their underrated mesh of performative arts, cinema and stage. After all, films based on successful, dialogue driven plays – not musicals – have some common features: comparatively minuscule casts, few sets, and scenes that drag on for ages. The moment in the strip club, for example, where Clive Owen accosts Natalie Portman: whether for the vulgarity of the dialogue or the oddity of the situation, it was mammoth, and, as if to seal that scene shut, Nichols ends the interchange with that remarkable zoom into Owen’s eye.
This is not to say that filmed plays can’t have moments entirely cinematic or entirely novel compared to the original play – Closer includes a medium of dialogue virtually impossible to perform on stage, the chat room, while Glengarry Glen Ross adds more information to the motivations of a previously ambiguous Shelly "The Machine" Levene, the illness of his daughter – but there will always be an element of theatrical performance.
Maybe this refers to the roots of film, to Melies and Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, performers who were first theatrical artists and then cinematic pioneers. Maybe this style is the sister to those films that were at first films and then somewhat theatrical: Mike Leigh and John Cassavetes (I’ll not touch upon the improvisational style of those to film makers as a factor in their works’ theatricality right now, but please note it).
In any case, if it is not the vulgarity that has people missing out on what is an undeniably fine film, then it is a sense of theatricality that apparently isn’t reaching people. This is a shame. The theatricality in Closer is very well handled: apparent and clearly theatre-based, yet experimental and not at all reserved in approaching this version of Closer as its own filmic document. Too many filmmakers have problems distinguishing their filmic text from its written counterpart (the first two Harry Potters (Chris Columbus) for example). Closer does well. Having a director who has converted a play brilliantly into cinema before helps (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff?, 1966).
I don’t want to suggest that Closer is flawless: the soundtrack may be over done, overly dramatic, especially in the chat room scene, and the leaps in time are at first constantly forward, then progressively forward and backward, a narrative shift that is not signaled, not constant, and not fair to the audience. But the acting is exquisite, which helps the already well-developed script, and in the end, this is a film worthy of continual attention, if not publically, than critically. I only fear that it will have an unsustainable legacy.