Lovely Bones

pretty is as pretty does: Natalie Portman looks wistful, or angry.

Mike Nichols' beautiful people tear each other apart, again.

Closer

by Sam Adams

"It's a lie," says Alice (Natalie Portman), staring back at her own image, taking in a photography exhibit while her boyfriend flirts with the woman he'll leave her for. "It's a bunch of sad strangers photographed beautifully, and all the sad fuckers who appreciate art say it's beautiful because that's what they want to see. The exhibition is reassuring, which makes it a lie, and everyone loves a big fat lie."

It's too easy to use her words to condemn Closer, adapted by Mike Nichols from Patrick Marber's play, but the temptation certainly presents itself. More than a temptation—it's practically a dare. These aren't just any photographs, but translucent, wall-size prints lit from behind so they glow like a movie screen, in a glossy, vacant space which might be an especially posh grotto. Beautiful people? Closer's four hands are dealt to Portman, Jude Law, Clive Owen and Julia Roberts. And sad? Boy howdy. You have no idea.

Alice, a stripper who has fled New York for London, meets Dan (Law) when she's hit by a car, which is pretty much Closer's version of falling in love. He picks her up, gets her to the hospital, and a year later they're a couple; she's waiting tables, and he's hoping his soon-to-be-published first novel will get him off the obituaries desk. But no sooner have we been introduced to the happy two than Dan is making eyes at Anna (Roberts) while she's attempting to snap his dust-jacket photo. No wonder Alice looks so sad in her photograph. (The melancholy of Anna's other subjects remains unexplained; presumably, she hasn't made out with all of their boyfriends.)

From there, things only get more beautifully miserable. Anna hooks up with Larry (Owen), a dermatologist with a fondness for sex chat rooms, but gradually succumbs to Dan's growing obsession with her. Alice gets kicked around like a doe-eyed football and eventually goes back to stripping. Dan's novel, based on Alice's life, flops, but at least he succeeds in stealing Anna away from Larry, at least until Anna decides the only way she can cause more pain is to go back to the man she deceived. And Larry, the self-described "caveman," exerts the only power he has: He pays Alice to expose herself to him, although Nichols positions the camera so Owen's head squarely blocks Portman's crotch.

In essence, that shot is everything that's wrong with Closer, a movie that wants credit for candor without exhibiting any. Sure, when Larry demands to know exactly how and in what positions Anna cheated on him, she responds in graphic detail—or rather she confirms his suggestions; Roberts keeps that movie-star mouth clean. Marber's dialogue substitutes cleverness for insight for insightful; it's one thing to let the double meaning hang in the air when a character who's quit smoking says "I've given up," quite another to repeat the gag with a different character.

The theatrical neatness in Marber's dialogue, the fact that everyone, even Owen's working-class dermatologist, talks like a bargain-basement Oscar Wilde, would be less grating if Nichols complicated Marber's conceits with visual ones. But his idea of visual wit is following the scene where Anna suggests that Dan call his book The Aquarium with a scene set in (wait for it) an aquarium. The closest Nichols comes to a visual scheme is spinning variations on the theme of voyeurism: the clicking shutter in Anna's studio, the ceiling-mounted security cameras in Alice's strip club, the faces, seen and seeing, that stare out from the walls of Anna's exhibition. But like the moment when Alice simultaneously critiques Anna's exhibit and the movie she's in, the voyeurism motif is a sham, a misdirection. Self-awareness is worse than ignorance when it doesn't lead to change; it's like those people who tell you right off that they're disagreeable bastards and expect that their honesty makes anything they do afterwards all right. When Larry looks up at the security camera and screams, "Can't we have some intimacy?"—the fact that he's looking right at us just feels like a gimmick.

Closer is hardly Nichols' first stab at When Bad Things Happen to Good-Looking People. He's been putting the beautiful people through their paces since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), although Closer's high-toned affectlessness contrasts markedly with its predecessor's alarmism. to be fair, the acting in Closer's is miles above Virginia's stage bound hysterics: Roberts has never seemed less like a star and more like a person, and Portman's performance in the strip-club confrontation with Owen is a welcome reminder of how much she's capable of when not facing down CGI squigglies—especially the way she keeps a smile glued to her face as she and Owen lunge for each other's hearts. The actors are so good, in fact, that you almost buy the line Marber and Nichols are selling. Nichols may be a phony, but he's a hell of a phony.

Closer Directed by Mike Nichols A Sony Pictures release Opens Friday at Ritz Five