Million Dollar Baby may be a boxing movie, but Closer is the one that lands the body blows. I saw it right after Million Dollar Baby, partly to tick another multiple-nominee off the list, but mostly in hopes of clearing my cinematic palate. It worked splendidly, a bracing, acerbic chaser that burned away the schmaltz – and the dreadful writing.
It’s not the most uplifting film, and I certainly don’t recommend it as a date movie. But it’s marvelously written and performed, and it restores your faith in dialogue-driven movies. It offers snippets of the ever-shifting relationships among Clive Owen, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, and Julia Roberts, showing mostly the painful scenes from the liaisons. The dialogue is admittedly a little heavy on “Did you sleep with him?”, but it also sparkles with mordantly funny lines, which Owen is especially adept at tossing off. (Roberts alone gets pretty much no good lines, but it might have been her delivery – she’s the most insipid character, and it’s a little hard to tell if that’s the writer’s fault or hers.)
As little as we really know about these
characters, the bitterly
familiar break-up scenes and the (few) charming courtship scenes kindle
a sense
of connection with them. It’s refreshing
to keep discovering new facets of their personalities throughout the
movie;
first impressions have rarely been more misleading.
In many movies, Jude Law’s easy charm and
Clive Owen’s barely repressed menace would have been their defining
attributes;
here, they’re part of a full personality. It delivers a flurry of
emotional punches, yet ends on a note of relative peace that sends you
out of the theater with a sense of closure.
Particularly after the empty hype of Million Dollar Baby, it’s good to see a movie that lives
up to its
billing. So, I’ll add it to my list of
movies you should see before the Oscars on Feb. 27 – that would be Hotel Rwanda, The Aviator, and Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (yeah, it got screwed on
nominations, but I
never pass up a chance to recommend it) – as well as to my
list of the best of the year.
Among the other random pleasures I want to
randomly mention: Damien Rice’s haunting
song, “Blower’s
Daughter,” that bookends the movie, and the scene set in the London
Aquarium,
which weirdly furnishes its tanks with massive
moai.
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