What a difference a close-up makes!

I saw Patrick Marber's acclaimed play Closer earlier this year, and it left me mostly cold. Marber's writing was sharp and enjoyable, but not precise enough to diminish the distance between the audience and the actors on the stage (to be fair, the fault may have lain at least a little with the cast). The story of the beginnings and endings of two ill-fated intertwined and interchangeable relationships, the play presumed to dig deep, but came up with very little. Neil LaBute has covered similar territory more successfully by maintaining a sense of amused disgust towards all his characters; Marber, who perhaps cares too much, writes like LaBute, only with bittersweet sadness instead of venom.

That said, there was a lot I enjoyed about the play. It's structure, for one thing, and also all the things that my imagination filled in; the expressions, the sideways glances, the minute inflections of a whisper, the way two people in love or who have been in love or who want to be in love act around each other, even when they're not speaking. These are the subtle things we see in films that that often cannot be depicted in live theater (which of course has many superior qualities of its own); the moments that let us see ourselves reflected in the screen. These are the very moments that Marber's play has an abundance of opportunities for, and so it seems fitting that Mike Nichols new film version is by far a stronger, better piece of work. After all, a close-up of a tear stained face or a barely-audible sigh or a glimpse of a desperate kiss can say more than any well written dialogue can.

The film begins with a particularly cinematic trapping: slow motion. Dan (Jude Law) walks down a crowded London street and, though the throngs of passerbys, his eyes meet those of Alice (Natalie Portman), and their momentary spark of attraction is caught and preserved for a few moments longer than it would be in real life; you know, the way it actually feels -- so they say. Then Alice, new to Britain and its traffic laws, gets hit by a car. Dan scoops her up and takes her to a hospital. The first thing she says to him upon waking, and the first line in the film, is "Hello, stranger."

This is an important line; I'll avoid outlining every single difference between the film and the play, but it should be noted that on the stage, this was merely an anecdote recounted amongst other things in the opening scene. That Nichols puts it upfront is not an affront to subtlety; rather, it's a marvelous use of simplicity. Nichols knows how to take a play and turn it into a movie without making it feel like a play. He did it a long time ago with Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, and last year, only slightly less memorably, with Angels In America. Here, he adds incidental dialogue to round out the scenes, and adjusts the pacing when necessary, cutting between what might have once been two separate scenes; more importantly, he shows what might be tedious if merely told, but never when the telling is more important.

Talking about the car accident, though, would have been tedious. The opening scene of the play becomes the second scene in the movie, as Dan and Alice converse as he walks to work. She's a self described waif and ex-stripper who is quick to laugh and dyes her hair red. He writes obituaries and wants to be a novelist. They like each other a lot.

Then the film cuts to Dan getting his photo taken by Anna (Julia Roberts). Apparently, he's written a book, and the photo is for the dust jacket. Apparently, Alice is a character in it. A kink has been thrown in what we inherently understand about cinematic progression; a great deal of time has passed from one cut to another, without a single clue. Alice has been living with Dan for two years. Dan is now on the verge of seducing Anna, whom he's just met.

This is the one aspect of the play I really loved; the removal of all filler. Each scene is the beginning or end -- or both -- of one relationship or another, and it turns out that nothing in between really matters; the relationships are distilled down to their first furtive exchanges and parting glances, and in those we learn pretty much everything we need to know about the characters. The story will jump ahead many more times, over many more months and sometimes years, and the effect is amplified on film; a temporal transition is usually treated with more significance, but Nichols cuts these beginnings and ends together with almost no noticeable juxtaposition, which makes the realization of whatever has transgressed offscreen that much more (appropriately) jarring. Not too long after the dawn of cinema, Sergei Eisenstein pioneered the theory of montage, demonstrating that two disparate images, when juxtaposed, can achieve as a whole an entirely different meaning than they would individually. The scenes in this film work on a somewhat similar basis.

Anna initially rejects Dan's Lotharian advances. As a practical joke, he inadvertently sets her up with an anonymous fellow he meets in an internet chatroom (this is the first scene in the film to display the sexually graphic dialogue the play became known for). That fellow turns out to be Larry (Clive Owen), a successful physician with an avaricious libido. He and Anna eventually marry. Her photography will bring her success. Dan's novel will fail. He'll pine for what he can't have. Anna will become attracted to what she doesn't need. Alice waits for the floor to drop out from under her, something she seems to have grown used to. Larry stays mostly balanced, despite his own foibles; like Alice, he may not be perfect, but at least he's honest. All of these characters will questions each other, in great and graphic detail, about the love and sex they've all shared. They'll hurt each other and lie and make up. Again, credit must go at least partially to Marber for finding just the right details to so completely create these characters in these minor little snippets; and to the cast, who speak his words with conviction and fill the spaces in between flawlessly.

That Law, Owens and Portman all give note perfect performances is no surprise. What is is that Roberts holds her own so well against them. This is the most serious and demanding role I think she's ever taken on, and while I've always enjoyed her, I wouldn't have expected her to be as strong as she is. What really struck me were the scenes where she listens to other characters berate her or plead with her or seduce her. Her face, when she's not smiling, is an almost eerie, abstract surface of delicate contours that defies common notions of beauty, and all the contours seem drawn to her enormous eyes. We've seen this expression before, but what was new to me was what she does with her eyes; creating deep impassive pools or sparks of indignation or longing that completely betray her dour expression. Of all the characters, Anna is perhaps the most complex; but Roberts makes her understandable, to the point that her actions make sense even when they shouldn't.

That there are elements that shouldn't make sense is one of the flaws of the play that Nichols hasn't assuaged. There comes a point at about the three quarters mark where Anna switches partners one last time. I know people who have gone back to the same person over and over again, but here it feels more like a dramatic conceit than anything else: one last belabored go-round in this game of musical chairs. It's a problem similar to the one that plagued We Don't Live Here Anymore earlier this year, in which the cheating couples endlesslyinterrogated each other over issues they, and we, already understood. At a certain point, enough's enough and if it weren't for the fact that these actors were so good, we might wish for another one of those abrupt jumps in the timeline.

But then, at the end, Nichols makes his biggest alteration to the play, and the best; he avoids an opportunity Marber succumbed to when writing the play, a final development that was rather trite, that implied some sort of meaning but actually had very little. Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don't want to know what the change was; I won't reveal the particular details (they weren't terribly important anyway), but suffice to say, Alice was not alive at the end of the play, as she is at the end of the film.In addition to that, Nichols also makes some changes to the final scene so that it, with great simplicity, drives home the point initiated at the very beginning. It has something to do with strangers, and it's a very simple. As it should be.

The final shot of the movie mirrors the first; Alice walks down the street in slow motion, and dozens of eyes turn to meet hers. It's a sad, funny shot (and, because it is Portman, intoxicating), and it puts the whole movie in perspective; these squabbles and and affairs and emotional injuries are just so minute once you put these characters on a larger stage. It's one of the problems with seeing this story on the stage; why should we care about these characters? In the film, we're reminded of the reason every time the camera closes in one a person's face.