Closer

HJ Links
—Review by Elisabeth Leitch
—Trailers, Photos
—About this Film pdf
—Spiritual Connections

Someone once told me that movies rarely portray people who are in love, concentrating rather on people falling in love and falling out of love. Depicting only first meetings, breakups, reconciliations, and points of crisis in two intersecting romantic relationships, Closer does just that. It spans four year’s time, skips months, portrays interactions less than twenty minutes long, and looks at those points when relationships begin, end, collide, and restart. A tale of the “modern relationship,� Closer does not merely explore an abstract happy concept of love and romance; rather, Closer reveals how we so often define love and, in the end, it questions the very ideas we allow to make up that definition.

Love is an accident waiting to happen.
The first statement to roll across the Closer preview screen months before the movie’s release, these words presented a first look at the love Closer would depict—love as chance, as a surprise, as something that happens in a moment, as something that cannot be denied, and as a literal fall that we are powerless to stop. In the opening scene of the movie, as Alice (Natalie Portman) locks eyes with Dan (Jude Law) and then gets hit by a car, this accident waiting to happen occurs. The question is, is the accident really love?

In a later scene, when Dan confesses to an affair he is having with Anna (Julia Roberts), he tells Alice that he just fell in love. She responds with the question, “You didn’t have a choice?� She states that that there is always a moment where you say to yourself, “I can do this or I can resist it.� And she leaves us with two more questions: Does an accident have to be love? Or even more so, can love really be just as simple as an accident?

Desire is a stranger.
Flashing between of few more clips of Closer’s preview, Closer’s second definition of modern relationships make the connection that if love is always a surprise, something new, and something unexpected, desire must rest in a similar realm. In one sense, this idea reflects the all too common feeling of wanting and desiring only that which we don’t have or know and growing apathetic towards and tired of that which we do know and do have. As Alice says to Dan during a break up, “I amuse you, but I bore you.�

In another sense, these words also seem to ask how real what we call desire actually is. If desire is a stranger, one must wonder if the feeling we recognize as desire is actually desire itself or if desire is a stranger we have yet to fully know. We must stop and ask ourselves if we can actually desire someone we know no better than the stranger walking down the street.

Intimacy is a lie we tell ourselves.
One step beyond desire and into intimacy, the preview’s third statement about modern romance not only claims that today’s relationships don’t fully know part of what we call love; it and so many scenes in the movie painfully point to the notion that, even in sexual relationships, intimacy is far too often non-existent.

Throughout the movie, much of the dialogue is about sex. The couples are clearly having it while we are not watching and have no trouble talking about it while we are. While they are physically intimate, however, every scene in the movie seems to portray the lack of any true connection or knowledge of each other much beyond the purely physical.

At the beginning of the movie, a scene involves Larry (Clive Owen) having cyber sex with Dan (posing as Anna). The dialogue is intimate. Larry is convinced he is in love. Yet, between the internet’s public nature, the literal distance built into it, and the fact that Larry is not even corresponding with who he thinks he is, the thought that this scene should actually be intimate is saddening.

Later in the movie, in a private room at a strip club with Alice, Larry screams out: “What the !*?# do you have to do to get a little intimacy around here?� He cries out for sex. He cries out because, for Alice, the whole scene is an act and her identity a lie. In connection with the entire movie, with sexual relationships rising out of “falls,� sex just because and out of guilt, and relationships between people who barely know each other any more than a stripper and the men who watch her, it seems that the question of where intimacy is could actually be asked about the entire movie.

Truth is a game we play to win.
In definition number four, these words reveal the harsh reality that relationships are far too often no different than competition in which every action is done to score, to win, and to gain an advantage. In this movie, truth is rarely told out of honor. Wrongdoings are not confessed in search of forgiveness. Confessions are not sought to offer forgiveness. Rather, truth becomes a tool to inflict pain, cause guilt, and be used to one’s advantage. Truth, when not useful for inflicting pain, is best kept close and guarded. And forgiveness, when given, is never offered, only earned.

At one point, Dan states, “Without truth we are animals.� Larry says, “Without forgiveness we are savages.� Throughout the movie, however, truth comes off as no more than taking or winning a point. Forgiveness is nothing other than getting the points you rightfully deserve back. And, when it comes down to it, neither reflects anything more than an animalistic desire to come out on top.

As a movie, Closer is very well done. As has been said by many people who have already seen the movie, the story is a very accurate portrayal of what many relationships look like today. The script and its frequent discussion of and emphasis on sex come across as unscripted and realistic. Each actor offers a performance filled emotion that we can see on each of their faces and Director Mike Nichols showcases the emotion of the entire movie with numerous close ups.

Although Closer is categorized as a drama/romance, I, however, would have to say there is nothing romantic about it at all. Yes, the story is about romantic relationships. It is about couples and sex and desire, but when it is all over, none of it is very romantic. After four years in and out of relationships, all the movie’s couples are are four people who still don’t seem that much closer to truly loving or knowing each other at all.

Rather than a celebration of love, the end of Closer is instead filled with a sense of emptiness and aloneness that longs for something more. It points the reality of Closer’s tagline: If you believe in love at first sight, you never stop looking. In other words, it makes us ask ourselves: If love is only an accident, if desire and intimacy never reach below the surface, if truth and honesty are only self serving, how in the world is any relationship ever going to keep our attention, satisfy any longing more complex than hunger or thirst, or give us any reason to truly allow ourselves to be known, allow ourselves to be loved, and allow ourselves to actually know and love another person?

At the same time that Closer portrays its relationships as the only reality, the emotional longing that each character exhibits throughout the movie tells us that we all need more and that in the end, there has to be something more. Loving us on purpose for longer than one moment, desiring to know every piece and aspect of who we are, never playing games or keeping score, and always offering forgiveness, God shows us the reality of a deeper, stronger love every day. It is love that is not an accident, a stranger, a lie, or a game. More than love at first sight, it is love that never ends, a love that is ours already, and a love that desires to replace too many skewed definitions of love that currently define too many relationships and leave too many people constantly looking for something more.