Closer (2004)

Seen at: Chez Sanyo, last week

Now that I have Netflix again for the first time since starting this blog, I'm wondering if I'll wind up writing up an entry on every DVD movie I see. Probably not, I suppose, since it would bog me down further than I already am. So I'll play it by ear for the time being.

That being said, I felt like I needed to write up something about Closer, which I saw last week at home. Like Dial M for Murder, it was suggested to me strongly by my friend Tiffany as one of her favorite movies. But whereas the Hitchcock movie is a masterpiece, I found Closer to be one of the least appealing movies I've seen recently.

Closer was directed by Mike Nichols, one of the finest auteurs of our era, and one I admire greatly. Among his early films is The Graduate (1967), which of course everyone loves, as well as Working Girl (1988), which is one of personal all-time favorites. But Closer was just a piece of dung, in my opinion.

The story is set in London and surrounds the painful and everchanging romantic interweaving of four people---two American women and two British men. The characters were unappealing and flopped around in emotional self-indulgence and self-pity without any redemption. The men, of course, are particularly dishonorable and unable to control their impulses and emotions in any way.

Among other things, the movie makes the familiar equation of "not lying" with "being obsessively candid," especially in regard to sexuality (see my write-up of The Invention of Lying).

Moreover, the men in the movie are obsessed with the sexual histories of the women. One of the received pieces of wisdom in Classical cinema was that women should be in control of their sexual past. It was part of the concept of female honor, as it was defined then. In the Classical view, no good is ever accomplished by forcing a woman to reveal her sexual history. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) is one of the best examples of this from the Classical era: Stanley destroys Blanche by forcing her to confront the "truth" about herself.

But whereas Tennessee Williams was conscious of the principle that a man should accept the polite fiction that a woman is allowed to present herself as a "blank slate," Postmodernity demands that we all be obsessively candid, and that requiring a thorough confession of one's sexual partner is always a righteous thing to do.

Or at least that's the impression I got from Closer, that "this is how things are," without offering any insight beyond this cultural illness. Another way of saying this is that whereas A Streetcar Named Desire is a true tragedy, Closer just wallows in a bestial semi-enlightened muck.

Perhaps what really turned me off to this film is how much it was transparently a stage play in a very clumsy way. If you read my write-up for Dial M for Murder, you might find this ironic, but in every scene of this movie I could see the dialog typed up on the page. I could see the actors "acting" their hearts out. And this from Mike Nichols?

I can't believe this was nominated for Oscars, especially in 2004, which was a decent year.

Well, Tiffany, on my count, you're one for two.

Verdict: Yecch.