CLOSER: REFLECTIONS ON TRUTH AND INSECURITY

By Joel Johnson

What makes a film “good?” Usually, a film is “good” because we enjoy watching it. It makes us laugh. We like the characters in the film—or at least some of them. We wish vicariously to share the adventure the characters are on. The film reinforces our values. It provides comfort. However, there are films that are intended to move the audience and not simply to entertain it. In addition, there are films that even go so far as seeking to tell a truth that the audience may be reluctant to accept—in fact, may reject outright—and certainly do not find particularly entertaining. Closer, directed by Mike Nichols from Patrick Marber’s adaptation of his own play, is just such a film.

Nichols’s film is a longitudinal study of the relationships of two men and two women. Marber’s play describes the events of the play taking place in twelve separate time settings over a period of approximately four and a half years. Marber’s instructions were that these time settings were not to be directly communicated to the audience, and the filmmaker has also followed this. The dialogue offers some cues as to the passage of time, but the audience must basically tease out the sequence of events showing the relationships evolving over this elongated time frame.

We see lovers begin relationships and end them and begin again and then go on to end them again. What is disturbing is that these are not simply the life-cycles of loves that didn’t grow into lifelong partnerships, but that the relationships are damaged by deliberate duplicity—a lack of truth in the relationship. All’s fair in love and war, but in this film, partners show a shocking level of selfishness and a callous disregard for the bonds of love—both their own and those of others. Can love be true?

The audience is also confronted with another type of truth—the truth of sexual desire. We see it through the crass mercenary exchanges of titillation for tips. We see it played out baldly on computer screens that have become tools for individuals seeking sexual adventure. It is distressing to be a witness to crude and graphic exchanges about preferred sexual acts. There’s a brutal honesty in these direct statements, but can sexual desires naked of any emotional adornment really be true? How does sexual desire affect love? Does it make relationships stronger, or is it corrosive?

The characters constantly talk about truth. They demand the truth—even about the unseemly. They gush hurtful words under the guise of “being honest.” Then repeatedly they say one thing and follow it with a contradiction. Which is true? Is it the first statement or the last? Is it the truth that hurts or the lie? Is anyone truly able to be completely honest?

The film at root is about our insecurities about being loved. Romantic comedies play on this, showing how the insecurities comically sabotage love—until the lovers finally recognize it is really true that they are being loved. The comforting message is that, despite your fears, love can be found. In Closer, the filmmakers show how desperate, frightened, masochistic, vicious, and pathetic we can get when we are threatened and we feel insecure about being loved. Love is sabotaged painfully—if not necessarily tragically.

So the four characters in Closer show us a barrage of reprehensible behavior. Proclamations of love turn out to be false. Relationships are pursued despite knowing that others will be hurt. Lies cascade from everyone. There’s the verbal violence of crude sexual words. This is followed almost inevitably by physical violence—though surprisingly sparingly and not from the expected source. Sexual acts are described using a mechanical and squalid frankness. Ultimately, painful lies are paradoxically preferred to a comforting truth.

For filmgoers open to acknowledging the ugliness of human nature and prepared to subject human relationships to penetrating cerebral scrutiny, Closer offers a puzzle of endless questions on love and human weakness. Nichols and Marber have crafted a clever story about beautiful people with ugly desires. Others may reject the four flawed distasteful characters and decide to flee the theater showing Closer to seek other films that offer more reassurance about relationships. If one finds a kernel of profound truth—disturbing though it is—revealed in Nichols’s film, the result is a film that is admired rather than embraced. 

 

5 1/2" x 5" 2008 Wolf Moon Calendar just $10.00 each
More Info

More Info

© Wolf Moon Press 2002-2008 all rights reserved.

Submission Guidelines