Patrick Marber adapted his own hit play of the same name, and gave a lucky director, Mike Nichols, a script that he could chew on. Peel away the carnal talk and what’s left—the bone structure of the piece—resembles Noël Coward’s “Private Lives.” We get two interlocking couples: Dan (Jude Law), a writer who falls in love with Alice (Natalie Portman), a stripper, and Larry (Clive Owen), a doctor who marries a photographer named Anna (Julia Roberts). The transactions are quick and brutal: Dan has anonymous online sex with Larry and a yearlong affair with Anna, Alice leaves Dan and starts working at a night club, Larry finds her there and tells her precisely what he wants, and nobody is happy. The film is more civilized than the play, the acid slightly diluted, and Law, for one, looks eaten away by the bitter pace of it all. Roberts, too, is haunted and pained, whereas Portman and Owen drink and spit their lines with undiminished relish, often at speeds that Nichols can barely handle.
That “The film is more civilized than the play, the acid slightly diluted, and Law, for one, looks eaten away by the bitter pace of it all” is very good. It’s a new line; it doesn’t appear in the review of Closer that Lane wrote seventeen years ago: see “Partners” (The New Yorker, December 13, 2004). The earlier piece has its pleasures, too, e.g., “People share here, but they share betrayals and bodily fluids as if they were viral strains,” and “Larry’s gibes are guided like missiles, and the meanest of them is unanswerable: ‘You writer.’ ”
Lane’s reviews spur me to see this great Nichols film again.
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