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 Ordinary people Getting farther from love in "Closer"
Love: the foremost four-letter word.
Or at least it is in Mike Nichols' glossy yet stormy, savage
adaptation of Patrick Marber's 1997 world-weary worldwide hit play,
"Closer," which collates the romantic lives of a quartet of
modern-day
men and women who meet, part, obsess, fixate, avenge, revenge.
The story covers the most emotional moments of meeting and parting in
the lives of four Londoners: self-pitying obits writer Jude Law,
photographer Julia Roberts, brash dermatologist Clive Owen, and
still-formative life force Natalie Portman. The dialogue is blunt and
the emotions even more so, capturing all the things you've thought and
felt but never put into precise and profane language at the moment
you're most wounded: that's the black heart of the scarring, scarily
funny events these actors enact with eager intimacy.
Nichols, 73, who has said he believes civilization begins and ends at
a man and woman's breakfast table, has been here before with movies
like
"Carnal Knowledge" (1970) and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
(1966).
"Anything worth fighting for is worth fighting dirty for," is one of
the
many epigrams he repeats about the stories he's attracted to. And why
do
actors trust him? "I love to take them to a place where they open a
vein. That's the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open
the vein."
And why do writers like Tony Kushner ("Angels in America") and
Marber, 40, trust Nichols? Marber, who directed the original London
stage production, meant to direct the movie, unwilling to let his play
fall into Hollywood's studio-development hell. Why Nichols? "Well, he
made `Carnal Knowledge' and made `Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.'"
And? "And he's just very charming and hilarious and smart. At the
first meeting we had, at his apartment, we had breakfast together, and
he was just someone I knew would be fantastic to spend a couple of
years
with working on something. He had a passion for the material. He
didn't
talk about it in some high-faluting, intellectual way. He just said, `I
know who these people are, I've lived it, I've been there.' He had
no
moral problems with it. He had no worries about likeability or all the
things that are problematic in the material. He just cared for it
instantly and passionately."
And he simply wanted to be involved in its filming. "He was quite
happy to produce it if I wanted to direct," Marber continues. "But
obviously, I was sitting in a room with Mike Nichols. I'm not
gonna say, `Yeah, I want to direct it and you can produce.' I
wanted him, the full experience. I also knew, he came from the theater,
he was respectful of the material, he wanted me around. That was part
of
his, how to put it, not his pitch, part of his conversation was, `Look,
the way I work, I have the writer in the rehearsal room, I have the
writer on set. We work on the screenplay together.' He was absolutely
true to his word. We're still collaborating as we do screening
[introductions] and Q&As. We're a double act!"
They both came from comedy backgrounds. "Mike and I were doing a Q&A
last night and a question was asked about that. I said that the
difference between Mike and I is that Mike, in his twenties, was rich,
famous and successful, and I was poor, desperate and unknown. Other
than
that? We had exactly the same background."
Marber did standup for five years after leaving school in 1986. After
that, a TV and radio career lasted five years. "So I was a performer
for
ten years before I wrote a play. I think it gave me an ear for an
audience, an ear for a certain kind of rhythm of speech. As a
playwright, you just want to control silence. Either with laughter, or
you want the silence to be very, very intense. With film, of course,
silence isn't your concern, really. But for a playwright, the way the
audience reacts is essential. Mike's got that ear, too. He came from
an
improvising background, and we share that. We like things tight and
quick and punchy, and those are comics' instincts. The one thing you
fear as a comic? Silence."
As well as reserve. "It's very important to me that there's no nudity
in the play. It's all about words, and the words we use, I wanted the
audience to always feel like they'd seen all this sex, but they
hadn't
seen a damn thing."
But around the world, a percentage of critics invariably see "Closer"
as something misanthropic and cynical. "I'm really used to that as a
criticism of the material," Marber says, shrugging. "People who
didn't
go with the play would say it's cynical and misanthropic. Mike has
inherited that criticism. Of course, I don't think I'm misanthropic,
I
don't think I'm cynical, I don't think the material is. I think
it's
true, I think it's dark, I think it's how it is, and some people
aren't
going to like that, and they're just going to say: `That's not how it
is
at all.' I see films that are very well reviewed, they're underscored
with violins, they're directing you how to feel and Mike Nichols
doesn't
do any of that shit. And I love him for that. He just presents it and
just goes, `How do you feel about this? I'm not going to tell you how
I
feel.' I love the integrity and the courage of that. I think it's
about
love and I think it's about how people behave in the grip of terrible
passion." "Closer" opens Friday.
Also by Ray Pride Home alone
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