Let's Talk About Sex

By RICHARD CORLISS

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, depleted by the hard truths he's forcing out of her. "Sweeter." Larry finally has what he wanted: the instant, utter and mutual eradication of their year-long love. "Thank you for your honesty," he tells her. "Now f___ off and die."

It's a pulverizing few minutes in Closer, the funny, hurtful, splendidly acted new film that Mike Nichols has made from Patrick Marber's play and screenplay. The scene leaves the audience as flush and drained as the participants. "I thought we were way past being able to shock anybody," says Nichols, 73, who has directed his fair share of cinematic sexual frissons. "But people are shocked. It's not necessarily because of the language but because things that usually go unexplored are explored in public. Some people are armed against it. They say, 'I just don't know those people.' Well, they're you, man!"

In dissecting Larry, Anna, Dan and the younger Alice (Natalie Portman) as they change partners over a four-year span in the London '90s, Closer is at first playful about the deceptions this handsome quartet of characters commit while falling in love and climbing out of it. After all, as Alice declares, "lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off." But if lying has a toxic residue, the truth can kill instantly. Larry, in interrogating Anna, casts off all pride to find the self-lacerating, the ultimate male truth. Was he better?

Closer runs counter to the numbing predictability of most current films: the inevitable plot points of revenge and uplift, the reduction of human beings to heroes and villains, the avoidance of complexity in sexual matters. If a batch of recent movies were to ask, "Are we sexier, more mature--better--than films of 30 years ago?", the brutal, truthful answer would be, "No way."

It's true that films are more sex-obsessed these days. All of pop culture is. Americans listen to Howard Stern, giggle over Janet Jackson, collect unrated DVD editions of the American Pie movies, gossip about celebrities' dirty secrets. We ogle (and then condemn) the dropping of a towel on a Monday Night Football teaser, leaf through Jenna Jameson's How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, log onto the Internet and bathe in all that warm cyberswill. But all this is essentially kid stuff, somewhere between adolescent and infantile in its voyeuristic avidity. It codifies the randy talk in a boys' tree house: the boasts and jokes and threats that mask the fear of (Ugh! Gross!) growing up.

Contrast today with the early 1970s, when movies like Straw Dogs, The Devils, Last Tango in Paris and Nichols' own Carnal Knowledge promised a future of truly adult depictions of sex. At the same time, the first wave of porno chic lured the curious to the burgeoning genre of hard-core. It seemed as if these two types of films might meet--that cinema might learn to depict the ordinary, universal and melodramatic collision of two bodies, two souls, in bed. But those days, and those hopes, are deader than disco. Hollywood's erotic audacity and artistic pretensions have shriveled ever since.

"I would argue that sex has very rarely been portrayed in the movies," says Owen, who played Dan in the original stage production of Closer before becoming Larry in the film. "It's always there as titillation, and it's often not about anything. But if you look at our lives, it's an interesting world that we inhabit when we're relating in a sexual way. And movies rarely go there."

Somewhere, there must be talented filmmakers who present sex intelligently onscreen. Yes, and most of them are in Europe, where people have been grownup for ages. France's Catherine Breillat has three movies--Fat Girl, Sex Is Comedy and Anatomy of Hell--in current U.S. art-house release or just out on DVD. In these fascinating acts of cinematic aggression, which either skirt hard-core or plunge right in, Breillat strips her heroines to the bleeding soul. Anatomy of Hell, Breillat's latest, is notorious for the objects--a rake, a lipstick case, a tampon--used as sexual implements. Across the Channel, Michael Winterbottom (Jude, Welcome to Sarajevo) tries to span the chasm separating serious cinema from hard-core with his new 9 Songs. Here the sex is explicit but tender, less a porn-film workout than a view of two people trying, for a while, to become one.

But we shan't wish for the impossible. Jude and Julia are not going to shag onscreen. Movie sex, however, doesn't have to be Show; it can be Tell. It can reveal startling erotic truths about the characters, about us, without so much as a spangled breast. It can talk about sex and, in Closer, talk brilliantly. What's surprising is that some of the finest movie sex talk has been in films by Nichols, a man originally renowned for his deft comic touch, first in the funny, painful sketches he wrote and performed with Elaine May, then as a director of Neil Simon plays on Broadway.

Nichols' first movie, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in 1966, a scrupulous transposition of Edward Albee's Tony-winning play about a rancorous married couple, raised temperatures, eyebrows and hackles throughout the film world. As Nichols recalls, "We weren't allowed to say 'Screw you' in Virginia Woolf. We had to take it out." His next film, The Graduate, in 1967, detailed the passive, loveless affair between a young man and his girlfriend's mother, and daringly mixed physical comedy with the most desperate romance. His boldest film was 1971's Carnal Knowledge, which traced 30 years in the sexual lives of two perpetually immature men. The excoriating chatter in Jules Feiffer's screenplay would be familiar to anyone who has sat at a bar while the guy three stools down pours out his little black heart, but it was new for mainstream movies. Its echo can be heard in Closer.

The scheme of Closer is simple: two people become a couple, break up, pair off with someone new. Dan and Alice become a couple, then Anna and Larry, then Dan and Anna and, briefly, Larry and Alice. We are shown only the beginning and end of each affair, when hopes are surging or betrayal sours the air. The piece is a series of cardiograms: hearts open and shut down. "Have you ever seen a human heart?" says Larry, a doctor. "It looks like a fist soaked in blood."

All this is in Marber's play, which the film follows closely. What Nichols and his cast bring to it is the eloquence of gesture. At the start of the film, on a London street, Dan is stalking Alice, or just appreciatively lurking, and when she gets hit by a vehicle he Galahads her into a cab. They are strangers, but in the forced intimacy of a back seat she removes his glasses, breathes on them and returns them. Her flirtation is a way of both expressing interest and asserting control. (You're a mess, her fiddling says, but I'm thinking of taking you on.)

Each of the actors has little moments like this: the slouch of Law's shoulders when his ego takes another sandbag, the tightening of Owen's smile to signal he's morphing from victim into avenger, the sting Roberts reveals behind her eyes when she's chastised. (Nichols compliments Roberts as "the CNN of actresses: on the close-up you actually see a crawl--noun by noun, adjective by adjective--of what she's thinking.") They keep Closer alive and lively, worth watching for clues even as we attend to the wit of Marber's dialogue. It's a film of cutting words and subtle sign language.

"I think sex in a movie is boring," Nichols says, "just as a scene of someone eating dinner is not that interesting." His favorite sex scenes tend to the suggestive: Rita Hayworth shaking off a glove in Gilda; Catherine Deneuve, in Repulsion, listening as her sister has sex in the next room. Anything more explicit is, to Nichols, just clinical. "Sex is very powerful as part of a fantasy, part of what glues you to someone, part of what makes life with one person the great adventure. But to stare directly at it is to be wasting most of what's available in drama and in film: the resonances, the things you don't see but that affect people's behavior."

That's what you get in Closer. "It's because of Patrick's brilliant writing and Mike's direction," says Law, "that the piece is very sexual without having any [explicit] sex in it." 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. And as we watch, we see ourselves, and smile or squirm.

It's terrific that a part-time moviemaker has directed so many films that cogently explore the language of sex. But it suggests that the rest of Hollywood isn't really trying. The occasional indie movie of today might have a warmly erotic scene (as inP.S.) or portray adults seduced and baffled by sexual possibilities (Kinsey), but mature audacity is in pretty short supply. Seeing Closer, teetering from empathy with to disapproval of each of its characters, a moviegoer has to wonder, Why can't there be a dozen, a hundred, films like this? Where's the good and bad sex in movies? Why can't directors locate where we live, how we love and lie to each other, and get closer to it? --With reporting by Desa Philadelphia/ Los Angeles and Josh Tyrangiel/ London

With reporting by Desa Philadelphia/ Los Angeles; Josh Tyrangiel/ London