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# ‘Closer’ a star-studded film full of moral depravity
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/closer-a-star-studded-film-full-of-moral-depravity/
- Published: 2004-12-03T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T05:46:35.000Z
- Author: Dan Dunn
- Tags: Entertainment, Santa Monica, #archive-import

Director Mike Nichols’ provocative relationship drama “Closer” boasts an awfully pretty central foursome that behaves pretty awfully. The film’s sumptuous contemporary London setting and lilting score belies the characters’ scatological obsessions with deception, self-pity and abject cruelty. Based on the hit stage production by Patrick Marber (who also penned the screenplay), the sum of this tragicomedy’s competing parts adds up to the best-looking portrait of moral depravity on the big screen this year. The heavyweight cast includes Julia Roberts, the ubiquitous Jude Law, Natalie Portman and scene-stealer Clive Owen all playing pretentious, unpalatable people of the sort you’d expect to encounter at Manhattan publishing parties and in Neil LaBute films. Ah, but no matter how detestable the behavior, it’s interesting to watch these selfish souls stick it to one another with such convincing invective. In this character-driven devilish delight, each of the stars gives it bad as good as they get it.

Law’s Dan — think Alfie, only less cocksure — is the film’s lynchpin. In the opening sequence the nebbishy newspaper obituary writer encounters a free-spirited American stripper named Alice (Portman) just as she’s being run into by a taxicab in London. A romantic connection occurs en route to the hospital before we’re suddenly transported three years into the future as a more-confident Dan puts the moves on Anna (Roberts), a seductive portrait photographer hired to shoot the jacket photo for his soon-to-be-published first novel. The book is about Alice, who is now Dan’s live-in lover, but so smitten is the author with Anna that he vows to make her his own … but not before engaging in a little Internet mischief that inadvertently leads Owen’s sexy beast of a dermatologist, Larry, into Anna’s arms. With the love quadrangle established, Nichols gives his players the green light to unleash the untamed passions that ultimately tears them apart. Owen, who played Dan in the late ’90s West End stage version, is wickedly good as Larry, a self-described “caveman” and the group’s most accomplished manipulator. Natalie Portman, whose Alice is as close to innocent as anyone comes in this film, adds needed delicacy to the otherwise nasty proceedings. And it’s refreshing to watch Roberts, the biggest star in the movie, deliver such an effectively tempered performance. (Rated R for sequences of graphic sexual dialogue, nudity/sexuality and language. Running time: 100 minutes)

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 3, 2004.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/120304.pdf?ref=smdp.com)