Star-studded 'Closer' should be a bonfire, but only manages sparks

The relationship drama "Closer" is that one big Hollywood movie this holiday season that every critic in America desperately wants to like -- a movie with a pedigree that positively glows with integrity and prestige:

MOVIE REVIEW

CLOSER

DIRECTOR: Mike Nichols

CAST: Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen

RUNNING TIME: 98 minutes

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

WHERE: Bella Bottega 11, Galleria 11, Grand Cinemas, Guild 45th, Meridian 16, Parkway Plaza 12

GRADE: B-

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It was directed by Mike Nichols, a legendary director who, after a long period in the doldrums, is coming off a big cable-movie hit ("Angels in America") and is poised for a career-topping comeback.

It was co-produced by John Calley, who led Warner Bros. in its golden age of the '70s and is now the grand old man of Hollywood, the industry's most respected eminence grise.

It's cast with four of the movies' trendiest stars -- Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Clive Owen -- each of whom is out to go the distance and snag an Oscar nomination.

Except for the casting, it was made with seemingly no commercial compromises, and it's devoid of the dumbing-down humor that tends to infect even the most artistic-minded movies of the new millennium.

And yet ...

And yet, while its execution is fine, the movie is almost shockingly vapid. You leave the theater wondering, "Couldn't all these gifted people have invested their good intentions in better material than this?"

Based on a play by Patrick Marber, the film opens with the happenstance London street meeting of Dan (Law), a British newspaper obituary writer, and Alice (Portman), a visiting American stripper.

In sequence two, Dan has written a novel based on Alice's life and they're living together, but he falls instantly in love with ex-pat American photographer Anna (Roberts) when she shoots his book-jacket photo.

Cut to months later, and Dan -- still with Alice -- plays a cruel joke on the resistant Anna that backfires on him when she falls for a horny Brit doctor (Owen) he finds for her on an Internet sex service.

From here, the script continues to leapfrog through a period of four years to more scenes in which the relationships between the four characters have radically changed and we're challenged to figure out how.

As it does, the movie is not without its pleasures. The production values are immaculate and the performances (except Portman, who seems miscast and way over her head) are strong, especially the de-glammed Roberts.

Yet the dialogue is stagey, stiff and unbelievable, and the action is full of unmotivated shifts in character. (Yes, these mysterious shifts happen in real life all the time, but in drama they're highly unsatisfying.)

It's an extremely cold movie, with plenty of pornographic talk but no eroticism or flashes of romantic magic or any of those freaky little moments that make life seem magical and worthwhile.

It's a movie that really doesn't like its characters and finds in them no grace, no nobility, no generosity of spirit, no hope of redemption or transcendence in a world of doomed interpersonal relationships.

Very much like Nichols' 1971 "Carnal Knowledge," it's a bleak examination of four selfish, soulless characters who we watch going through their predetermined movements like rats in a laboratory cage.

And how you relate to the movie probably will be a function of where you are in your own love life. Either you will find it to be wound-salving honesty or a pointlessly pessimistic waste of your time.

P-I movie critic William Arnold can be reached at 206-448-8185 or williamarnold@seattlepi.com.