I’m no speed reader, but I read Patrick Marber’s play Closer in about 30 minutes, and then wondered how the heck somebody would turn the sparse, depressing work in a feature-length motion picture.  Inventing scenes that weren’t in the original work seemed kind of lame, so I figured there would be a lot of obvious padding to push the running time beyond the 60-minute mark.  And when Closer’s first scene popped up on the screen, complete with slo-mo walking through the streets of a big city to inspirational indie music (the same way a typical episode of Felicity was stretched to fill an hour), I prepared myself for lots and lots of unnecessary fluff.

But there wasn’t an ounce of it.  Closer, the latest from the Mike “Sultan of the Emmys” Nichols (Angels in America) is a lean, mean fighting machine, with a serious emphasis on the mean and the fighting.  The film, even more so than the play, resembles what We Don’t Live Here Anymore might have been like were it co-penned by Neil LaBute and David Mamet.  I’m not sure conventional audiences are ready for something like that, if the folks at my preview screening were any indication.  Oh, they’ll eat up Christmas With the Kranks and National Treasure, but give them something real and emotional and they’ll knock each other over trying to flee the theatre.

The thing is, these saps will be lured in by the pretty, pretty stars with the pretty, pretty smiles, and then get blindsided by The Next James Bond asking The Mother of America’s Favorite Twins about The Sexiest Man Alive and the taste of his man yogurt.  Don’t even get into The Next Audrey Hepburn showing more skin than Jamie Gumb.  Those of you brave enough to stick around will get to enjoy a bunch of Damien Rice songs, and also pick up some fun nicknames to spice up your relationships (but Buster might be kind of weird if you’re an Arrested Development fan).

Like Anymore, Closer is about two couples who try, unsuccessfully, to secretly swap partners.  But unlike Anymore, Closer digs a lot deeper into proceedings, which unfurl here over a number of unclearly defined years.  Failed novelist Dan (Jude Law, Alfie) wants to get all up in photographer Anna (Julia Roberts, Mona Lisa Smile) even though he’s already got a perfect and perfectly devoted girl named Alice (Natalie Portman, Garden State) back home.  Anna is with dermatologist Larry (Clive Owen, King Arthur), who may or may not take up with Alice once Dan dumps her.  The different combinations of potential partners is virtually endless, especially when you factor in the same-sex possibilities (red state readers: this is when you’ll want to spit out your chaw, fire your gun at the screen and declare your unflinching hatred of them damn queers – this goes double for red state men, as well).

What makes Closer so interesting, aside from the across-the-board blistering performances and crackling dialogue, is that you might empathize with a character in one scene, and then hate their guts in the next.  Everyone is a victim, and everyone is an abuser, though not always in the most obvious ways.  Closer is very adult, and very clever.  It also has, to the best of my recollection, less material than Marber’s play did, and that’s something that blew my mind because the film is paced so well.  My only major complaint is that the simultaneous bedroom breakup scene wasn’t handled more…uh, simultaneously.

1:38 –

for sequences of graphic sexual dialogue, nudity/sexuality and language