The Blower's Daughter

Every once in a while a movie comes along that strikes a chord with you. Its themes, its lines, and its characters resonate with you on a subconscious level. Director Mike Nichol's "Closer" is one such movie for me. I saw it three times in theaters and have subsequently purchased it on DVD. This is perhaps borderline obsessive. What follows is my trying to make sense of what it is about "Closer" that I have found to be so beautiful and true.

As the movie opens, Damien Rice's "The Blower's Daughter" plays in the background while we see two strangers, Jude Law and Natalie Portman, walking the crowded streets of London. They catch each other's eyes and cannot turn away. Not preoccupied with selfconscious embarrassment, they continue to stare at one another as they draw closer, smiles ablaze. They pause at an intersection, no twenty feet apart now. Ms. Portman looks instinctively to the left for traffic and seeing none proceeds to cross. However, being in London, traffic comes from the other side and she is instantly hit. Thus begins her and Mr. Law's romance.

The movie's opening prepares us for a love story not unlike most that is guided by the hand of fate. In this case, the two lovers are thrown hopelessly together by the initial tragedy and this will bind them forevermore. But "Closer" is not one of those kinds of movies. We as an audience are very much like Ms. Portman's character in that we look the wrong way at first only preparing ourselves to get hit.

The movie which also features Julia Roberts and Clive Owen relies on stellar performances from this ensemble cast as they lay bear the raw human emotion that is built up and ripped to shreds in the course of relationships. They show beauty, ugliness, hurt, pain, anxiety and anger in synchronized dance with each other. The cast take on demanding roles and nail the performances. We do not see the characters at all parts of their relationships. Rather Patrick Marber's screenplay only gives vinettes of the different critical junctures where sparks first occur, where choices that pass the point of no return are made, and where weeks and months of inevitable decline finally lead the only possible outcome, a fight and break. As an audience, we are not surprised by what occurs in the next scenes because they are the only logical resolutions of what we have just seen.

The most challenging assertion that "Closer" makes is at once the most true and perhaps because of its truth the most scary. The movie suggests that the romantic notions of love, the idea that we are fated to be with a special someone, are bogus. Instead, the characters in this film are with the person they are with. While the movie's opening sets us up for the typical romantic narrative, the rest of the film is a far cry from it. In most movies pertaining to love, there is some notion of absolutism in regards to love. That is to say, there are two people who are supposed to end up together and if they do it is a comedy and if they do not it is a tragedy. At the end of "Closer," Mr. Owen and Ms. Roberts are together and Ms. Portman and Mr. Law are alone. However, there is no feeling that things turned out contrary to fate or in accordance with fate which would leave this movie in the limbo of the typical romantic dichotomy. But "Closer" attempts to challenge this dichotomy and problematize it. We can see this through the two male characters of the film.

Owen is in many ways the brutish barbaric character. He refers to himself as a caveman. He likes his talk dirty, his sex carnal, and his women whores. But though he be a Neanderthal in many regards, there is a softer side of him as well. He more than any other character loves in this film. He loves unconditionally. He shows that love is joy and pain and can ravage the soul. When he is weary from love, he looks it. He can forgive and move on. He can get over the prehistoric hang-up men have with another man being with his woman. Though upset, he can move past it. Though he will scream and shout, he will never strike a woman. Owen's character understands that love does not come from the cosmos but more often must claw its way out of Hell. Law's character subscribes to the notion of fate and so is the appropriate foil. He however is so steeped up in the notion of fate that he cannot move past that first moment where he realizes love with someone else. For Ms. Portman, it is that moment in the opening scene. He is still awed by it five years later, which is amazing, touching, pathetic and sad. There isn't any other moment is their entire relationships that is worth remembering for him. Where Mr. Owen is brutish, Mr. Law is effeminate. He treats women as ladies. But he himself cannot forgive. He cannot settle. He also is pushed in one scene to strike Ms. Portman. It is almost as if where Owen knows he is a man and is secure in that knowledge, Law chases that security the entire movie. He strikes Portman not because he is violent, but because he does not feel in control. Not necessarily of her, but of himself and his own fate. He strikes her to reassure himself that as a man he can make things happen. It's pathetic, it's regressive, and it shows Law to be in many ways less evolved than Owen.

Ms. Portman is the most naive character in the film. Her street crossing mishap is merely emblematic of this and foreshadows that it will cause her to be hurt. We can't help but laugh when she tells Mr. Law that if you love someone, you don't leave. The audience knows that love does not have the holding power that Ms. Portman supposes it to have. Our laughter, to ourselves though it may be, is also a troubled one because we have to question why isn't love enough? Why do people in love cheat? Why do people in love leave? At the end of the movie, though, we come to realize that Portman's character is not as naive as we supposed it to be. While she allows her heart to get closer to Law, making her a parallel of Mr. Owen, she constructs an imaginary identity. While she gets hurt tremendously, when she chooses, when she falls out of love, she can leave never to be seen, heard from, or found again.

Ms. Portman's character also makes the most insightful comment in the movie when talking about an exhibition of Ms. Roberts: "It's a lie. It's a bunch of sad strangers photographed beautifully and all the glittering assholes who appreciate art say it's beautiful because that's what they want to see. But the people in the photos are sad and alone, but the pictures make the world seem beautiful, so the exhibition's reassuring which makes it a lie, and everyone loves a big fat lie." This sums up why "Closer" is so beautiful. It does not reassure like so much of art. It looks at love and relationships through a raw and uncompromising lens.

"Closer" is indeed a movie that we can't help but feel ambivalent about. We hate it because it destroys notions of romanticism in society where half of all marriages end in divorce and where tabloids clutter every check-out isle of the supermarket detailing the latest in a string of celebrity infidelities. We hate it because the characters behave abominably to each other and cheat like there is no tomorrow. We hate it because deep down somewhere, we have a lingering suspicion that it is true. It's truth is the reason we love it too. Inundated with stories in romantic comedies and tragedies of epic loves that were inevitable that seem to desonate with reality, "Closer" seems closer to reality. It argues that love is a choice. Cheating is a choice. We take actions and we have agency. We love by proximity. We love that which is closer to us. In the end, we do not end up with or without that person we were supposed to be with. We end up with the person we choose to be with. "Closer" ends without closure because this is how life actually is. As Damian Rice sings, "And so it is/ Just like you said it would be/ Life goes easy for me/ Most of the time..."