CLOSER

CLOSER might make an interesting double bill with KINSEY. In CLOSER, the characters are perfectly capable of asking and answering pretty much every conceivable question about sex they're even perfectly comfortable performing a wide variety of acts (albeit offscreen). However, this candor and comfort doesn't seem to have done a thing to help most of them live honestly in their own skins.

Dan (Jude Law) meets Alice (Natalie Portman) when, moments after they smile at one another as strangers on a crowded London street, she's hit by a taxi. He gallantly takes her to the hospital, she's well enough to go for a walk with him afterward, and next thing we and they know, they are happily living together. Then Dan has his photograph taken by Anna (Julia Roberts) and a few flirtatious words later, he's totally obsessed. Anna doesn't want to become involved with a man who's living with someone else, much to Dan's dismay. So Dan plays a practical joke (hilarious to the audience and eventually funny to the characters) that has the unintentional outcome of hooking Anna up with unattached doctor Larry (Clive Owen). So everybody should be living happily ever after, right? Not so fast. Emotional and perhaps even physical danger is at every turn and there are quite a few turns.

The switchbacks and permutations in Patrick Marber's script, adapted from his stage play, are truly clever and his dialogue at least for Dan and Larry is often flat-out terrific. The writer seems a lot more at home getting into the heart of male jealousy than he is with women expressing their honest emotions, with the result that, although all four of the main actors give remarkable performances, it's Dan and Larry we feel we know intimately. Portman is vividly vulnerable yet gives Alice an undercurrent of vindictive rage that's fascinating, but the character is not allowed the eloquence of her anger. Roberts' Anna likewise doesn't get to vent fully, though the actress as a wonderful moment where she conveys the character's mingled incredulity, pain and exasperation at her mate's insistence on knowing the minutiae of her sexual infidelity. Law is truly charming yet makes clear the depth of Dan's inability to catch on to what's happening in the moment, while Owen as Larry is a walking illustration of unstoppable desire and reined-in fury.

Director Mike Nichols handles everything so fluidly and handsomely that CLOSER always feels like a movie rather than an opened-up play. A sequence where Dan poses as a woman Anna, in fact in a sex chat room, with Larry cluelessly believing he's instant-messaging back and forth with a genuine female, works so well that it's hard to imagine it in any other form and a section in a strip club plays like a dream.

CLOSER doesn't feel like an all-encompassing statement about jealousy and sexual desire, but it's articulate enough and the performances are convincing enough that you want to argue with the characters afterward, a sign that it holds you as it plays out its dark dance.