Cruel Intentions

Reviewed - Closer: It's more like a filmed play, and it gets off to a shaky start, but Mike Nichols's drama of rocky relationships has a nice, nasty touch, writes Donald Clarke

The opening, throat-clearing moments in Mike Nichols's adaptation of Patrick Marber's theatrical obituary (partly delivered by an obituary writer) for honourable engagement in the sexual battlefield do not bode well for the integrity of the project. As Natalie Portman, playing a not-entirely-believable stripper, strolls towards the traffic accident that will trigger the film's action, we hear a weedy love song, The Blower's Daughter, by the Irish meta-hippie Damien Rice. Whereas the tune may be to many viewers' tastes, its airy languor is entirely inappropriate for a drama whose unrelenting nastiness would more easily accommodate the sound of sandpaper on flesh.

Happily, Nichols, who, as the director of 1971's Carnal Knowledge, has previous experience in this field, proves himself to be otherwise resistant to compromises. The more profane outbursts in Marber's dialogue remain untouched - a discussion about how other characters' effusions taste allows Julia Roberts the opportunity to say things she never did in Runaway Bride - and the sense that bad, rather than good, behaviour may be its own reward still hangs over Closer. This is an excellent date movie for couples just learning to loathe one another.

After Portman's Alice is knocked over by a cab, she is rescued by Dan (Jude Law), a journalist and aspiring novelist. Alice and Dan engage in banter and begin a relationship whose first test comes when the lovers bump into Anna (Roberts), an icy photographer with a withering line in sexual put-downs. Later Dan, while posing as "Anna" in an Internet chat room, brings Larry (Clive Owen), a dermatologist, into the frame. The writer lures the poor sap to an imaginary meeting in an aquarium where - in the sort of insane coincidence which causes you either to shrug your shoulders or storm out of the cinema - the real Anna is sitting observing undersea predators (hmm?). Couplings, uncouplings and hideous arguments ensue.

Though Portman, playing the least empowered member of the quartet, wears her fragility well and Roberts stacks up tremendous levels of sadness behind her not-quite-alive eyes, Clive Owen acts everybody else off the screen. There is a tremendous moment when, after striving to be kind and being abused for his efforts, he suddenly discovers the delights of emotional cruelty. The object of his ire is Dan, and the shallow Law, yet again the weakest link in a major release, seems to crumple into a soggy ball before him.

Sadly, for all its pleasures, there remains something naggingly unsatisfactory about Closer. Nichols has decided that nobody else but the four principals should speak and that, barring the occasional stroll through the park, the play's scenes will not be opened out to any significant degree. The aim was to give the film a faintly dream-like quality and, combined with the disconcertingly vast interiors, few of which would fit into any building in London smaller than the Millennium Dome, this effect is well achieved. Of course, it also means that the production looks exactly like what it is: a filmed play. Gripping, nasty, offensive stuff, nonetheless.