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Last updated on: December 14, 2004 at 3:01 pm by Barbara Nicolosi

2004-12-14T15:01:00-07:00 Barbara Nicolosi

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

NOT EVEN CLOSE

The only good thing about the screening was that I didn’t bring one of my young male friends with me. Then, I would have had to labor under guilt for subjecting another human being to the cinematic disease now in theaters called Closer.

And here I was thinking I’m falling behind by having been out of theaters for a couple of months. If only I could have prolonged my absence a few more weeks.

Closer should be subtitled “Four Narcissists With Potty Mouths Commit Mortal Sin.” Mike Nichols has a perverted side, as anyone with a keen sense of the obvious can detect in Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf and The Graduate. This film brings all of us way, way too close to his degrading sexuality. I honestly think Nichols gets some kind of fetishistic thrill out of making beautiful, super star actors act like pigs.

Just like in Garden State and so many dramatic pieces in the last few years, Closer thinks it is being profound, when all it is being is embarrassingly banal. Watching the film feels very much like watching a five year old stare at a pile of his own vomit.

There is nothing insightful in beautiful people with no moral framework lying to each other to get more sex with other beautiful people. I heard all of the idiotic actors in the piece say on one talk show or another, that the film was about “Truth.” It isn’t really. It’s about alleycats slinking around and humping each other.

The only hopeful thing about this piece of pretentious, over-blown, highly stylish piece of celluloid garbage, is that it is one more nail in the coffin of the Sexual Revolution. Or rather, we are seeing so many rejections of the lies of the SR, that this film could probably only be considered glaze on a nail in its coffin. Nichols doesn’t condemn the SR, he seems to take it as an evolutionary fact, but the characters’ lives here do. Hopefully, no one in the theater wants to be any of these dreadful, selfish people who talk in soap opera dialogue (“Why won’t you let me love you?”) or worse than soap dialogue (“I love you. And I have to go piss.”).

No Christian consideration of Closer would be complete without noting that the language in the film is the worst I have ever heard. There is one particularly long scene in which the two male characters engage in vile Internet sex. It was disgusting. Way beyond what St. Paul could have been thinking when he said, “Let some things never be spoken of between you.” I got out of my seat twice during the scene, but then I sat back down again BECAUSE SOME CHRISTIAN FILM CRITICS I KNOW SAID THE FILM WAS FASCINATING!!! (And tomorrow we will rationalize watching people hit one another with sledgehammers.)

Pass. Pass. Pass. Stay far away from Closer.

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