Rating of
2/4
Ghost Seed - wrote on 02/24/09
"Abandon all hope ye who enter here."
Who would think - even for a second, that a piece involving Jude Law, Clive Owen, MIKE NICHOLS, and the stellar (personal crush) Natalie Portman, would be anything less than earth-quaking? Unfortunately, quite less than earth-quaking it ended up being.
This is a story for, and about the soul-less. Grotesque game playing to provide a proper platform for juicy, bitter, dialogue. Juicy it is, and if wisely used (say, sprinkled throughout a REALISTIC story) it would come across brutally beautiful and heart wrenching. (Instead of childish.. even mildly tacky at times.)
Ugh. It pains me to write this, Nichols..
Being a huge, *HUGE* fan of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf - a sad, rich, dynamic play adapted to screenplay PERFECTION by Ernest Lehman and put to film stylishly.. I'm sorry, Mike.. Closer just has no pulse.
I want to like it - I really do! I have watched it repeatedly and I come to the same conclusion: There is little to no style or spirit here.
The characters are just marionettes on strings. EACH coming off staggeringly pathetic.
There are tears and there is awkward begging. Quips and cruelty.. Good enough for the stage, but film is film. Weepy, declarative statements and cheap insults spouting from the mouths of hollow, one dimensional characters that are horrible cheaters and liars "just because" - isn't enough for the silver screen.
