Word: owen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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No sadistic cop could grill a suspect with more brutal intensity than a man brings to the job of questioning the woman who's about to walk out on him. In just a few minutes, Larry (Clive Owen) has experienced the first five stages of the cuckolded male: denial, derision, pleading, sobbing, threatening. Now, in confronting Anna (Julia Roberts) about her lover Dan (Jude Law), he atavizes into Caveman, the alpha male in competitive fury. "Where did you make love: What parts of the house, what parts of the body?" "How did Dan perform?" "Was he 'better'?" "Gentler," she acknowledges...
...What Nichols and his cast bring to the piece is the eloquence of gesture. Each of the actors has telling little moments: Portman's busyness with a stranger's glasses; the slouch of Law's shoulders when his ego takes the impact of another sandbag; the tightening of Owen's smile to signal he's morphing from victim to predator; the sting Roberts reveals behind her eyes when she's chastised. (Nichols flatteringly calls Roberts "the CNN of actresses: on the closeup you actually see a crawl, noun-by-noun, adjective-by-adjective, of what she's thinking.") They keep...
...Another way "Closer" diverges from the standard Hollywood movie is that it allows, insists on, multiple points of view and shifting audience allegiances. "People are going to switch depending on their emotional history," Owen says. "Have they been betrayed? Have they betrayed somebody? I think all of us of a certain age - all of us who have had any average experience of sex - have, to some extent, been in some of these scenes. And depending on your experience, that's where you sit. So it's not like one character takes you through the journey, and you experience...
...told TIME's Philadelphia, "that the piece is very sexual without having any sex in it whatsoever." Plus a few bits that might make some future director's list of favorite sexy scenes: a long, steamy kiss between Law and Roberts; a lap dance that Portman performs for Owen...
...agree with Owen that "Closer" is "an adult drama. It's adults talking about sex and fucking each other and the pain of breakup. But even at its most shocking, it's never less than very witty and intelligent. It's a proper grown-up piece of writing about people having sex and the problems that can come with that. And it's got very well-written dialogue. It's such a treat to be able to have such language at your disposal. Dialogue used to be much more important in movies, and we've lost that." Thanks to Marber...