Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Want to have some real fun with this piece? Try to read it all out loud in one very big breath. It’s like getting very very stoned, but cheaper!
It's Saturday night in New York. Let's go to the movies.
We'll start things with a yellow cab ride downtown from the Upper East Side, Carnegie Hill, Woody's neighborhood--a clear cold night after a night of hard rain here in New York, in Manhattan. I was going to take the train downtown but the MTA decided on its own that the No 6. train, the local, had to be worked on this weekend so all I got at the subway entrance was a wide red tape and get-a-ride -somewhere-else. So I caught a bus down Lexington Avenue to 86th Street to kill some of the cost, then caught a cab from there. We crossed through Central Park over to Columbus, headed downtown on Broadway at Lincoln Center and turned left onto 57th Street, headed for the DGA Theater at Seventh Avenue.
I was late. I was supposed to meet a friend F doesn't like for me to be late.
I went into the theater and find F said. "The brisket. Or the eggplant across the street. Trust me, it's good."
F looks at me. "There are just certain things I know. And things I know that I do NOT know."
We take our seats. Someone gets up and announces that S.S. will be interviewing M.N. after the viewing. F shoots me a look: I told you, didn’t I?
The lights go down, the film rolls, and onscreen we see Natalie Portman with red hair walking down a London street, and Jude Law walking towards her in the other direction, and they have a meet-cute and they fall in love and then…
Wait. Can’t write the review this way. This is all too important. First we need to talk. Yeah, us. We two. Lean in:
What do you expect is going to happen when you fall in love, anyway? Yeah, you in the cheap seats. What is it, exactly that you’re trying to get?
Is it an identity? Are you trying to make the other person a part of you? A part you can’t live without?
Fine. Then what if one of you changes your mind? Are you willing to wreck the other person on the chance that you might be a little happier with someone else?
What does that make you? An animal? A brute? A criminal? Insane?
What about the secret damage we do? When we tell each other the truth about it, about our real or imagined betrayals, do we make things worse? Does truth make us animals more than lies do? Are we cowards when we lie and heroes when we tell the truth, though hearts and lives and sanity be shattered?
What drives us to the truth about sexual faithfulness, anyway?
I WANT ANSWERS.
And your response, when you finally find your voice, might well be…
Why? What good do you think the answers will do you?
These questions rage at the heart of this film, and of the play they’re based on. Jude Law is an obit writer who’s put out a second-rate novel about his girlfriend, Natalie Portman, whom he met at her traffic accident. Julia Roberts is the photographer hired to take his picture for the book cover, with whom he immediately initiates an affair. Clive Owen is a doctor drawn into meeting Julia accidentally after a deceptive and perhaps mischievous chatroom encounter with Jude Law’s character. They form two couples and then swap partners and play musical chairs until one couple ends up together and one doesn’t. This film, however, takes place both above and below its story, with the deep rage and sense of entitlement to happiness that drives these characters, and the techniques that the director uses to bring this to dramatic play, a hit on both the West End and Broadway stage, to the screen.
The first remarkable thing about this film is it’s dialogue. It’s a playrights’s language: a tennis game, a barrage, a flood: it never ceases. These people ’t speak, they interrogate each other under a hot lamp in a dark room, drill down into each other’s hearts with every conversation and they are ruthless about it. Ruthlessness is a funny thing: when you’re falling in love with someone, it can help you discover yourself. It’s admirable, I guess. When you’re trying to protect something you’d prefer hidden, it can feel like a violation. It’s despicable, I guess. It all depends on the circumstances, doesn’t it? Closer is rather like a Frankenstein story, you can see these characters wanting to know too much about each other and you want to shout out and warn them back from the brink of madness, the want knowledge about each other’s essential beings that only the Gods should possess. But they won’t listen, or they can’t hear because of their quest for personal satisfaction.
But the words are all that are real to these characters: actions are just the things that the words report to their partners. Now, words are not a neutral medium: some words are the greatest gift you can give, and some words are vile and unforgiveable. These characters use both to get what they want. Jude Law and Julia Roberts are willing to cause their partners any pain, any pain at all, if only they can find a little more happiness with each other than with their partners. At least, they think they’re willing. Maybe they’re not—but they’re going to try it anyway, and they’ll use words to get what they want. Actions they’ll conceal, or delay: but not words. This is Woody Allen’s Manhattan with a roll of quarters packed into the glove.
You will notice there’s no music in the film. The movie doesn’t need it, the language completely fills the film’s auditory space. There are three exceptions:
very beginning, intro music
very end, outro music
And the third exception, the remarkable chatroom scene, which will surely be written and talked about at great length. It plays like the haircutting scene in The Rabbit of Seville. The music and action work like that. It’s key to the movie because it uses language in its purest form to create a relationship which is entirely illusory but has profound creative consequences. Keep that sentence in mind when you see it in the story, see how the actions caused by the deception make possible a real relationship (not the one you expect) and pay attention to how these people create romantic narratives for each other, then create narratives of betrayal to replace them. Their lives are at the mercy of these narratives, their hopes for love are crushed by them.
But enough about the language. Just keep in mind that the worst indictment in the movie is when Clive Owen hands out “You….WRITER!” to Jude Law.
Another remarkable thing about the story is the way it handles time. The scenes are in general a year apart (at least), and usually mark the beginning or end of a relationship phase. They are marked by a fade to a whiteout, then a fadein to the next scene. More on that when I get to Soderberg and Nichols talking at the end of this.
Space. The spaces are cleverly and knowingly handled, cinematographically speaking. We open in the streets of London in wide shots that take in many people, then take us through open public spaces: a park, a photographer’s studio, an aquarium, a photo exhibition. As the film progresses we retreat into private spaces, spaces filled with meaning by the couples that live in them, not by the objet within. But the climactic moments in the film take place in confined spaces, a clinical doctor’s office and a sterile hotel room, until the final shot is taken in the streets of New York. These shots are a perfect reflection of the kind of love this film is finely examining: the talk begins in a open and footloose manner, in the way lovers talk when they’re coming to know each other, and slowly telescopes to obsessive examination. (Except for Jude Law’s Dan, who is never “off”). In the way the director threats this obsession with the truth, the movie in certain scenes reminds me of nothing so much as Vertigo. See if the overhead shot in the strip club doesn’t make you think of the staircase shot (yeah, that one) in the Hitchcock film
Exactly.
On to the characters. There are four.
Dan. The casting in the film works to tell this story, and, if you read the gossips, you can’t help thinking about Jude Law leaving his wife (editor? girlfriend?) for a lithe young actress named after a color I’ve only seen with the words Burnt and Crayola attached to it (language is everything). Whether or not the films events resembles anything in his life doesn’t matter, that’s what resonates when you watch them occur. As Dan, the narcissistic, callow obituary writer, Jude Law gives a performance that rescues his reputation from the pointless Alfie remake. There’s a sort of cruelty in anyone as beautiful as he is, a sort of self-absorption that only a professional beauty can bring to the screen. It’s to the director’s credit that in this case that actors polished beauty neither redeems or excuses the character’s careless bed-jumping in the audience’s eyes. He’s an amoral monster, and by the end we’re all quite clear about it. Jude Law's character is a monster, in the way Vertigo’s Scotty is a monster, because his desire to know the truth knows no bounds (neither does his willingness to manipulate others with fictions) and will sacrifice anyone and everyone in its path. He doesn’t get that knowing sometimes juts increases the pain.
Alice. Natalie Portman comes to the screen to fulfill the promise of talent she’s been hinting at in her children’s performances, and she brings it off with passion and clarity. Her character has the beauty of a heart-breaker, but she has always had a sort of professional detachment about it, and this works for her in the character of Alice Ayers, whose beauty, when handed over to the callous, becomes simply a means for her survival. It’s become well known that she asked Mike Nichols to cut a nude scene from the movie, and I think she made the right choice, and Mike did the right thing by taking it out. Had it been left in, it would have turned part of the audience against her – another Hollywood actress using what she’s got to get what she’s gonna get. It would have been crass. In the film, her performance as a stripper is frank and lewd and sexual and cold, but it is not crass. The phrase “the moronic beauty of youth” is spoken by one character to describe her character and it fits—the character, not the actress. Alice’s own beauty does not protect her from the belief that another character’s beauty promises his goodness as well, and it’s her turn in line to learn. It’s not her fault she can’t recognize Dan’s basic nastiness: she’s young and she doesn’t yet know.
The other characters’s are not young, and this matters in the story.
Anna. Julia Roberts, like Cary Grant, really does one thing, and she does that very well indeed. She's no longer mystic pizza or pretty woman, she’s a 37- year old woman closing in on forty and she’s one of the most formidable and powerful women around in the most highly competitive industry in the world. Her character updates Diane Keaton character in Manhattan. There’s nothing attractive or fun or exciting about the fact that her character can’t make up her mind between two men. She’s a deeply manipulative, selfish character (like Jude Law, an artist), and is as vile in her own way as Jude Law is in his. In fact, the character reminds me of another character in Woody film, the Mia Farrow character in Husband’s and Wives, when we’re warned that she may seem like she never asks for anything, but in her passive aggressive way she always gets what she wants. You know that of all the characters in the film, she’ll end up safely moored at the end.
Larry. Clive Owen delivers the standout performance of the film. His character is Larry, a doctor, a little older than Dan, a little wiser and the sort of fellow who is quietly smarter than everyone around him. To quote the fictional president on West Wing, he sees the whole board and plays accordingly. As a man probably over forty, he knows what the stakes are, he knows what the cost will be if he loses and he plays to win. And, oh yes, he actually does love Anna, in the real, grounded sort of way. On the whole, you sympathize with his particular brand of ruthlessness, because unlike Dan and Anna, he doesn’t make the first move, he just refuses to let his life be bulldozed by the tunnel-visioned Jude Law and the confused selfishness of Anna. And Dan, ultimately, is his greatest challenge, a vortex of self-absorbed love-seeking that victimizes himself and Alice. To his credit, Owen doesn’t play Larry as yet another manipulative monster in a film surfeit with the type, but as a man who has the intelligence and patience to with a difficult human situation and to take the steps needed to correct it. If he doesn’t mind hurting Jude Law at the end, he recognizes that it’s not personal,. it’s a kind of justice due to be meted out in a situation that Jude Law’s Dan created. The older and wiser Clive Owen’s character knows the game is deep, the stakes are infinite and we must, if we wish to survive, take care. We hand our identities over to the beloved at our own risk. When we are fighting to preserve our relationship with them, we are fighting to save ourselves.
The story onscreen deals with these four characters in the way a ballet does, in a series of pas de deuxs, almost always with two people only. Even when they’re in the same space, as at the picture exhibition, they’re paired off. The effect is two fold: that you’re with someone and you can’t escape, and there’s that obligation to talk we all feel when there are only two of you there and it’s almost impossible to remain silent. And then there’s the unpleasant feeling the audience has: by never settling on a real protagonist, but rather coming up with different pairings each time, we feel that we hardly ever get enough time to spend with any one of them, and we’re annoyed when that scene is over all too soon.
This film has far more questions than answers, and you leave the theater understanding that real love comes only once the story-telling has stopped, once the narrative collapses and we are simply left with each other. When we, people, choose to stop inventing romances, which are entertainment, not love, and choose to let the stories stop, then we begin to live in real appreciation of the other person in the relationship; and when we choose to leave each other, to betray the fundamental agreement on our relationship and identity, the drama and the stories grind to a start again. Among many other things, this movie is about two people who realize the value of the what they have, and two people who don't. At the end of the film there's a Twilight Zone shot of a plaque on the wall that suggests that even what little knowledge of his girlfriend Jude Law thought he possessed was illusory and a lie. Which, if he had settled for it, may have been enough to make him happy.
What good would the answers have done him, anyway? What good did they finally do him?
Finally, a hint, not a spoiler: when you see the passport at the end of the film, remember that Clive Owen’s Larry demanded of Alice in the strip club THE TRUTH. And it may have turned out that she ultimately trusted Larry more than Dan, and gave it to him. That she didn’t love Larry and did love Dan is a sad report on the human condition: that in the romantic situation, the two have little to do with each other, and that mistrust may drive attraction.
MIKE AND STEVEN
The lights come up. Steven Soderberg and Mike Nichols take the stage. Attributed dialog is remembered not recorded, so it’s not perfectly accurate. But it’s damn close.
SODERBERG. Well, do you want to ask me any questions.
NICHOLS. Uh, sure. How was your trip?
SODERBERG. Fine, thanks.
They then talk about the play for a few minutes.
NICHOLS: I actually read the play before I saw it, then I saw it and I really liked it. I got together with the writer and talked to him. I said, you know, I’d really like to make the movie. And he said, well, you know, I’d like to make it myself. So I said, well, I understand that, it’s great material, best wishes and good luck. And I put it aside and forgot about it. And five years later, I still found myself thinking about it, and when we got in contact again I said, well, how’s it going with the movie. And with one thing and another, it hadn’t happened, so he said if you’re still interested, you know, I’d like you to do it.
SODERBERG: I was really interested in the way you handle time in the story.
NICHOLS: Time is so hard. You know in a book for the first nine pages or so you’re in one place, then the writer has to make a decision, jump a minute, an hour, a day, a year? What? And that choice informs the rest of the story.
SODERBERG: Your story works with beginnings and endings and has big spaces in the middle.
NICHOLS: Well, it’s the way we percieve time, I think, all squashed up. We remember the beginning and the end and the middle gets lost. Especially in a story, whereas true love is true love because it's finally NOT an interesting story, it's just a series of days that make up the middle...but it doesnt' make a good movie...
SODERBERG: You got such great performances from the characters. This is really an example of great casting. And good coverage.
NICHOLS: Do you cover a lot?
SODERBERG. I shoot everything I can think of? I feel like I still haven’t got enough to work with about a third of time.
NICHOLS. Hmm I don’t. I try to now, I have to have people remind me. I’m more like, oh, that’s perfect, that’s two shots, that’s enough, and then I get into the editing room and it wasn’t. That’s maybe half the time. But I’m still learning. SODERBERG. I know you rehearsed a lot.
NICHOLS. Well, yes. You know, you hear actors about working with great directors and they always say the same thing: he didn’t tell me anything. And that’s why you rehearse. That’s when you take the time to give things names, you know, the things you’re doing: oh, we’re doing this, then this and then this, you give those names. And then when you get to the set you all know what you’re doing and you can let the actors live in the story, because we all know the story. You have to rehearse when you’re shooting out of sequence.
SODERBERG: To get spontenaity…
NICHOLS to get life. You know why you don’t tell an actor what to do on the set? Because then that’s what you get. They do what you told them to do, and nothing happens.
SODERBERG: Now you changed the ending. It made the entire story different.
NICHOLS: The ending was such a problem. We shot it the way the play ends first. You know, Alice goes back to New York and is killed and Dan brings Anna and Larry back to the garden and tells them about it. And Jude Law gave a wonderful performance. We shot it. And I looked at it and I just thought, this doesn’t make sense of the characters, it’s just wrong. And we showed it to people and I’m still thinking it’s not right. So I talked to the writer and he was so wonderful—it’s so important to have a writer who’s light on his feet—and he approved the idea I came up with, which was very nice of him. And I think it’s so much better.
SODERBERG: When he sees the plaque.
NICHOLS: And he (and at the same time, the audience) realizes that she never trusted him. And that she was right. To get her shot in New York, we had to borrow a camera, get set up on 47th Street, and find a basement to shoot the customs scene in, and, you know, get the people back. It was frantic.
SODERBERG: Who do you think was the protagonist in the film?
NICHOLS. Well I think, because of the ending, Alice becomes the film’s protagonist. If the film has one. You know, when I was making the film, I kept thinking, who’s going to want to see this, about these people. I mean, they’re awful. But that where the actors are so important. You know, Diane Keaton. One of the things I admired about her was that she always started out with characters who were—I mean, they were a real pain in the ass. They are annoying. But when she started there she could bring the audience a long way with her, into understanding and caring about the character. Isn’t Julia Roberts amazing in this? She’s just so alive in a scene you can just do ANYTHING and she’ll just be there in the moment, it gives you great freedom when you work with her. Clive Owen’s used that in the scene where he shouts out in a funny way I forGIVE you and he went into the scene determined to make her laugh and Julia was so mad at him and we thought, oh, we’ll toss that. But you know, it was great, and we kept it and that’s the shot we used.
SODERBERG. Well, thanks. It’s the second time I’ve seen it and it was really great.
NICHOLS. Thanks so much.
Applause and the end. D-- and I get the brisket at Stage Deli, us and the tourists. We split a matzoh ball soup. They bring pickles but no slaw. End of night, end of story.
Thanks to Mr. Sheldrake for this, his inaugural review. Excellent work, man.
"Moriarty" out.
