Closer (2004)

Closer arrives from 2004 with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and declines to apologize for it. Mike Nichols directs Patrick Marber's adaptation of his own play, and the result is four attractive people in London treating honesty as a negotiable instrument. Dan, Anna, Alice, and Larry lie to each other, sleep with each other, and lie about sleeping with each other, in a cycle that runs four years and ends with nobody improved. The dialogue is sharp, cruel, and articulate. It is also entirely concerned with the personal, which is where the film's cultural ledger stays.

There is no broader social project here, and the film makes no attempt to construct one. The cast is uniformly white, the relationships uniformly heterosexual, and the conflicts uniformly romantic. Race goes unmentioned. Class goes unmentioned, unless we count a dermatologist's income. The environment, capital, and the body as a political site all sit outside the frame. A stripper appears, and the film regards her with the same unsentimental eye it turns on everyone else, which is to say it offers no thesis about her labor or her worth. The characters are articulate and self-destructive, not representative and instructive. Nobody learns anything useful. The final image, a woman crossing against the signal in New York, is a mood, not a moral.

What remains is a well-acted chamber piece about appetite and deceit. It is not trying to improve anyone, and it does not pretend otherwise. A sommelier might call it a dry, acidic vintage, best served cold and without accompaniment. The cellar is full of louder bottles. This one simply refuses to lecture, which in its own quiet way is a kind of integrity.