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Rating:  -
Don't waste your time on this movie of four emotional cripples. I saw nothing redeeming here, lies, deceit, obsession, codependency, but nothing I'd say meeting even a broad definition of love. Four broken souls living hell on earth. Depressing movie to be avoided.
Rating: -
I can't think of a worse movie. I can't believe that I sat through the whole thing, but I guess I was hoping that there would be something redeeming about it. I was wrong. It sucked until the bitter, awful end.
Rating:  -
Plenty of reviews of the movie already, so either you like it or you didn't. I couldn't really see any reason to have bought this in Blu-Ray. There were no alternate endings or anything, it's just a drama, so the graphic impact of the upgraded player are minimal.... This seems like a waste of money when a regular DVD would have done just as well.
Rating:  -
It is unlikely I have seen a more misogynistic film since Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men, but director Mike Nichols uses his uncanny ability to delve deep into the human condition to come up with a challenging, superbly acted and at times surprisingly empathetic film about four self-absorbed, unsympathetic people. I'm not sure what other director could have been better qualified to translate Patrick Marber's stinging, cynical play set in an urban chic London. As he has proven from his 1966 debut, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? through 1971's Carnal Knowledge to 2003's Angels in America, Nichols knows how to humanize the brutality and emotional pain that people can inflict on each other. This master filmmaker's skill is what prevents this 2004 drama from shriveling up into a wearing exercise in manipulation and deceit.
Writing the screenplay from his own play, Marber provides dialogue that is alternately sharp, observant and harshly erotic. At times, his acerbic work reminds me of Frederic Raphael's superb 1960's screenplays for Darling and Two for the Road. The story that brings the four characters into a sexual intersection of tête-à-têtes and one-upmanship does get rather convoluted. The film covers about four years in elapsed time but takes liberties with scene transitions, focusing on the beginnings and endings of relationships and consequently complicating the chronology and timing of events, sometimes unnecessarily. Suffice it to say that each character figures out his or her capacity for hurting someone else and then goes about feeling empowered, guilty or some combination of both. It is telling that there are hints and often threats of physical abuse in the dialogue, but nothing is executed until a final, defining slap, filmed in slow motion, of course.
The acting is uniformly strong, though I believe the "beautiful people" aspect of the casting does distance the actors from the audience, perhaps intentionally. I am not a huge fan of Julia Roberts, but she surprises as Anna, the photographer who becomes the focal point of a shark-infested triangle. Looking rather sallow and absurdly thin, Roberts doesn't come across as all that attractive here, but her sullen demeanor seems to free her from the contrivances Hollywood has offered her for the previous fifteen years. It seems inevitable that she is now playing the older woman archetype now, and she accepts her fate with a seasoned truthfulness that propels the rest of the characters. That she gives the weakest performance among this quartet is a tribute to the high caliber of the talent involved. At first, Jude Law plays Dan, the ethically challenged writer who fails as a novelist, as a hopeless romantic, but what he gradually uncovers is a tormented soul weakening under the burden of his deceptions. It's a brave performance especially since his character is the one most willing to hurt the others deeply for his own selfish motives.
As Larry, the equally manipulative and sexually insecure dermatologist, Clive Owen sinks his teeth into a role that makes the most of his swarthy onscreen persona. His emotional nakedness and bull-in-a-china-shop approach to his problems make a brutishly affecting counterpoint to Law's rather effete character. In her adult breakthrough, Natalie Portman is alternately vulnerable and bruising as Alice, the stripper who falls hard for Dan and won't give Larry the intimacy he needs when he is rejected by Anna. She tantalizes with her flighty sexuality and then grounds her character deeply when she is subject to an excruciating break-up from Dan. Her character's evolution, however sketchily it is presented, is the only one that achieves a poignancy that nearly transcends the story's cynicism. I have to admit the unrelenting tone does induce a numbing effect that makes you wonder why you should care about the fate of any of the characters. But leave it to Nichols to make you want to know what happens to each of them. The only significant extra in the 2005 DVD is a music video of Damien Rice's haunting "The Blower's Daughter", which is used effectively as a musical bridge for their comings and goings. Highly recommended though don't expect to feel life-affirmed afterward.
Rating: -
The only good thing I can say about this movie is that it's reassuring to think that no events similar to the events in this movie have ever happened. Not that no one has ever cheated, lied and generally behaved like a scumball, but that no one has done so for such incomprehensible and arbitrary reasons or with such utterly unconvincing dialog. In fact, "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" had rather more realistic dialog than this movie. In scene after scene, we're supposed to believe that there is sexual tension between these characters, even though they actually just seem to despise each other and feel very awkward around each other. "Time" magazine apparently called this "a love story for adults." All I can say about that is that if adults actually behaved like this, then civilization would collapse in less than a year.
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