EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU 1996

This essay is part of The Barrymore Trilogy Blogathon hosted by The Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood. 

This post is dedicated to Drew, but for more Barrymore, visit the site!

At one time or another, everyone has had the experience of feeling as though some real-life event or activity were taking place in a movie. For example (and speaking from embarrassingly personal experience): owning a convertible in Los Angeles in the early 80s made it a certainty that when Blondie’s Call Me played on the car radio, that infectiously percussive, synth-pop ditty instantly became my background music. Even a routine Slurpee run to the nearby 7-Eleven was transformed into the slick opening credits sequence of my very own 80s erotic thriller.

The desire for reality to more resemble the idealized fantasy world of the movies is, perhaps, a film fan's wish as old as cinema itself. And while there's no telling the countless headaches, heartaches, and dashed illusions to be spared were one were outfitted with some kind of built-in immunity to the seductive sway of Hollywood's Technicolor fairy tales; were such a thing even possible, I'm more than certain that a reality stripped of the belief in the possibility of the impossible would hardly qualify as anybody's idea of living, anyway.

The eternal paradox of movies has always been its ability to render the real as slightly dreamlike, while capturing the essence of the ethereal with canny verisimilitude. No other sphere of emotion seems to inspire this quality in movies as evocatively as the contemporary notion of romantic love. Especially love of the transcendent, dizzying, sweep-one-off-one's-feet variety favored by musicals. And when it comes to romance and the eloquent expression of love, can any movie genre compare with the Hollywood musical?

Woody Allen as Joe Berlin

Goldie Hawn as Steffi Dandridge

Alan Alda as Bob Dandridge

Drew Barrymore as Skylar Dandridge

Edward Norton as Holden Spence

Julia Roberts as Von Siddell

Everyone Says I Love You is Woody Allen’s first - and to date, only - musical. Chronicling a year in the life of an affluent (what else?) extended family residing in New York’s Upper East Side, Allen uses the changing seasons to metaphorically underscore this nervous musical comedy about the variable nature of romance. As characters with I-wish-I-could-believe-he’s-being-satirical names like Skylar, Djuna, and Holden navigate the choppy waters of love in picturesque Venice and Paris; Woody Allen’s familiar universe (where every city looks and feels exactly like New York) reveals itself to be a wonderland of  magic realism.  

The fantastic has always figured in Woody Allen’s particular take on reality: Humphrey Bogart was his life coach in Play it Again Sam, Marshall McLuhan materialized from behind a movie poster to silence an intellectual boor in Annie Hall, etc. But the world depicted in Everyone Says I Love You is a world swept up and in concert with the giddy elation of love and spring fever. Ordinary folk break into spontaneous song and dance; store mannequins come to life; the injured and infirm leap and turn cartwheels in a hospital; the dead cavort amongst the living; and, in my absolute favorite Woody Allen moment of all time, romance grants lovers the ability to defy the laws of gravity.

Just You, Just Me
Store mannequins put on a show for engaged couple, Holden (Norton) and Skylar (Barrymore)  

But don’t be fooled; for all its song, dance, humor, appealing performances, beautiful locations, game cast, and moments of genuine charm; Everyone Says I Love You is still, never, ever anything more than your typical Woody Allen film. Which is both its boon (I like that Allen doesn’t bend his style to fit the conventions of the genre, he literally makes them dance to his tune), and its bane (if you already don’t like Woody Allen, this film isn’t likely to turn you into a convert).   

Perhaps due to the challenge presented by shooting a full-scale musical on location with a score of some 16-plus classic songs -lushly arranged, at least four choreographed production numbers, and a cast of largely non-singers who (according to production notes) only discovered they’d signed on for a musical after having already committed to the project; Allen gave himself more latitude than usual in recycling so many of his familiar tropes:

The eccentric, broadly-drawn extended family - Radio Days, Hanna & Her Sisters

The refined character attracted to a coarser individual - Love & Death, Interiors, Crimes & Misdemeanors, Hannah & Her Sisters

The heart wants what it wants - Manhattan, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy

Two women attracted to the same man- September, Hanna & Her Sisters

Spying on an individual’s therapy session - Another Woman
Allen’s old coot/young woman fetish - Manhattan,  Husbands & Wives

Allen’s bougie lifestyle fetish - Too many films to list

Cuddle up A Little Closer 
Playing the daughter of Woody Allen and Goldie Hawn, actress Natasha Lyonne is Djuna, the film's narrator and central romantic flibbertigibbet. Here she's serenaded by love-at-first-sight beau, Ken (Billy Crudup) who's joined in song by cabbie Robert Khakh, who sings the 1908 ditty in Hindi

When you add to the mix the fact that Allen also indulges his other catalog of obsessions: The Marx Brothers, jazz, pseudo-intellectual pretensions, and people who actually consider "poet" to be a career path; Everyone Says I Love You winds up representing a kind of  Woody Allen "best of" collection set to music. Happily for me, it manages to be the best of his lighter, funnier films.

Looking at You
Happily married couple Steffi (Hawn) and Bob (Alda) head a household overrun with five children, a grandfather, a tyrannical maid, and Steffi's romantically luckless ex-husband, Joe (Allen)

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Woody Allen, a man who strikes me in interviews as someone incapable of understanding even the most elemental aspects of human behavior, does seem to understand movie musicals. Indeed, a great deal more than many directors like Rob Marshall (Nine) or Susan Stroman (The Producers), who have their roots in musical theater.

There’s something intriguingly off about the idea of a Woody Allen musical. At first glance, it seems as if the director’s trademark neurotic, over-cerebral style is an ill fit for a genre characterized by breezy lightheartedness and fantasy. But upon reflection, one realizes that Allen’s films have long taken place within a fantasy bubble. What is his hermetically sealed vision of Manhattan, populated with characters bearing little to no resemblance to actual human beings, but an update of those impossibly rich penthouse dwellers who spent all their time in tuxedos and evening gowns in those Warner Bros. musicals from the 30s?

The already built-in artificiality of Woody Allen’s world, one he’s cultivated in film after film, is a Cinderella-shoe fit for a musical, simply because one of the chief hurdles of contemporary musicals has been the increasing audience resistance to the conceit of average people spontaneously bursting into song in natural surroundings.
Woody Allen's version of Manhattan has always been a New York of his own state of mind, so there's no authentic "reality" to be shattered. With Everyone Says I Love You, Woody's artificial New York feels tailor-made for the genre-mandated artifice of the movie musical!

My Baby Just Cares for Me
 A trip to Harry Winston for an engagement ring erupts into an amusing production number

By the 1990s, the movie musical had almost become extinct due to director's inability to make the genre work. Modern audiences (who had no problem with animated characters) just found real people singing onscreen to be either comical or corny.The genius of Everyone Says I Love You is that Allen, rather than trying to ignore that fact, distract audiences from it, or try to think of clever ways to sidestep that particular hurdle; structures the entire film around exploiting it. He embraces the corniness, shares in the camps, and by doing so, celebrates the naivete of old musicals.

Jumping in with both feet, Allen instantly addresses the issue of audience discomfort by having the very first words of the film sung by a character. He even plays with the genre by citing the characters' self-awareness ("We're not the typical kind of family you'd find in a musical comedy") and consciousness of their vocalizing ("What are you singing about? You're not in love with Holden!")

But best of all, Woody finds a way to keep his fantasy on human scale. Ordinary people DO break into spontaneous song, but only in appropriately ordinary voices. Choreographed production numbers erupt around them, but the characters fail to be instantly imbued with terpsichorean gifts. Instead, they move with the ungainly grace of those overcome by emotion.

And therein lies the source of Everyone Says I Love You’s ultimate triumph of charm over Allen’s sometimes problematic world view: all the singing is just an extension of the character's emotions.

If I Had You
Skylar finds herself falling for the ill-bred charms of ex-convict Charles Ferry (Tim Roth) 

I loved musicals long before I became a dancer, but I think movie musicals dug their own grave by their over-reliance on cold spectacle and technical polish. I much prefer the wavering, unsure voices in Everyone Says I Love You, to the kind of rigid vocal perfection of a Marnie Nixon (West Side Story My Fair Lady). Likewise, the dancing here is sometimes a little ragged, but it touches my heart more than any of the impenetrably cold, gut-busting numbers in Hello, Dolly!. When it comes to musicals, I still prefer being made to feel something about the characters than merely being asked to ooh and aah over empty spectacle and technical polish.

Makin' Whoopee
Patients, orderlies, and doctors alike weigh in on the consequences of marriage

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

When it comes to the creative expression of emotion, I’ve always felt there to be a kind of unofficial hierarchy of intensity. If it can be verbalized, you say it; if it’s a feeling difficult to put into words, write it. Feelings too strong for the spoken and written word cry out to be sung, and that which transcends verbalization, can only be danced.

That’s why musicals are the ideal genre for depicting love and romance. It’s a natural thing for people to want to express happiness. When you’re a kid, you skip, maybe as an adult you’ll whistle or hum…but for the adult, the sex act is the only outlet we’ve afforded ourselves for unrestrained expression of amorous joy. An act so personal and subjective that the more literal its depiction, the less joyous any of it seems. 

More than any other genre, musicals are able to externally depict the internal sensations of love. 

In Everyone Says I Love You, Woody Allen takes the usual hyper emotionalism of his stock characters to the next logical step. They sing of their joy, their longing, and their anxiety. True to the Woody Allen universe, the film’s main musical theme is the 1931 pop standard, I’m Thru With Love; not a song about the rhapsodic elation of love found, but of the wistful resolve of love lost and never to be.

I'm Thru With Love
The elegant pas de deux Goldie Hawn & Woody Allen perform along the Left Bank of the Seine is beyond sublime  

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

I enjoy Everyone Says I Love You a great deal, some parts I even love (the Halloween sequence is delightful, and Drew Barrymore and Edward Norton make an adorable couple). But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a bit of a chore slogging through yet another one of Allen’s peculiar takes on morality and ethics. (Everyone Says I Love You was released some four years after this messy breakup with Mia Farrow, but just one month before the publication of Farrows tell-all memoir, What Falls Away.)

One of the things I’ve always hated about those sex comedies of the 60s was the degree to which lying and deception was depicted as a cute, harmless path to love. In this film, the heinously invasive subterfuge Allen’s character engages in to snag Julia Roberts (a stomach-churning pairing suggesting necrophilia more than a May/December romance) feels downright sociopathic.

However, the overall appeal of the cast, and the goodwill extended by the film’s sprightly tone and lovely score of old standards, goes a long way toward mitigating my general impatience with Allen’s self-serving moral code.

Hooray For Captain Spaulding
A Marx Brothers-themed Christmas Eve costume ball

Everyone Says I Love You was released at a time when it was widely believed only animated films could succeed as musicals. Allen's film, a more traditional musical, was released in December 1996, the same month as Alan Parker's Evita - a musical that seemed to go out of its way to try to make audiences forget it was a musical.

Enjoy Yourself (It's Later Than You Think)
Recent guests at a NY funeral home refuse to let death spoil their fun

PERFORMANCES
Since a tribute to the illustrious Barrymore family occasioned this particular post, I'll reserve the focus of this section exclusively to then 20-year-old Drew Barrymore (granddaughter of John) as Skylar Dandridge. Unique in this instance not only for being the sole member of the cast to be dubbed (crippled by fear, she claimed her voice was too abysmal even for a film populated with untrained singers), but having the distinction of later conquering her fear and singing in her own voice in two (!) later films: Music & Lyrics and Lucky You, both released in 2007.

A star at the age of six with her appearance in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Drew survived a Lindsay Lohan-ish adolescent to become a popular star, director, and producer. While a likeable and winning personality on talk shows, I confess I've always credited (blamed?)  Barrymore (along with Sarah Jessica Parker, Catherine Heigl, and Matthew McConaughey) for killing the romantic comedy.

Barrymore is well within her rom-com comfort zone in Everyone Says I Love You, but in small doses her familiar giggle and demur routine comes off rather well. Her close association with Adam Sandler has made her strictly persona non grata with me, but her performance here and in the exceptional Grey Gardens (2009) reminds me that she is indeed a very talented actress. Albeit one to whom the lyric from the song, My Baby Just Cares For Me applies: "There's sometimes a doubt about her choices!" 


BONUS MATERIAL
The "Everyone Says I Love You" number from the Marx Brothers film, Horse Feathers (1932) 

Copyright © Ken Anderson

BLACK SWAN 2010

For sheer baroque audacity, few films not directed by Ken Russell can hold a candle (or toe shoe) to Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan. It takes a certain kind of impassioned genius to attempt a psycho-sexual horror fable centered in the mystique-laden world of classical ballet, yet Aronofsky succeeds beyond all reason. By turns disturbing, transgressive, sensual, absurdist, and achingly beautiful, Black Swan is almost swoon-inducing in its willingness to go straight over the top in an effort to alight on something as keen as a pinhead.

Ostensively a grim fairy tale excursion into madness wherein a repressed ballerina's obsessive desire to dance the lead in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake takes a startlingly anamorphic turn, the real themes of Black Swan are infinitely broader in scope and defy any single, unqualified interpretation.

Natalie Portman as ballerina Nina Sayers

Vincent Cassell (does he have the sexiest nose, or what?) as ballet company manager Thomas Leroy

Mila Kunis as rival ballerina Lily

Barbara Hershey as stage-mother-from-hell Erica Sayers

Winona Ryder as soon-to-be-disposed-of prima ballerina Beth Macintyre

Taken at face value alone, Black Swan is an astonishingly effective psychological thriller blessed with a consistently creepy vibe born of Aronofsky's almost intrusively subjective shooting style. In its ability to (sometimes literally) peel back and expose the layers of compulsion: artistic, sexual, & otherwise, Black Swan is a worthy contemporary companion piece to Roman Polanski's 1965 thriller, Repulsion.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

Far and beyond the surface enjoyment I derived from Black Swan's stylishly novel take on the horror/ thriller, was my delight in discovering that the film resonated so deeply with me.

I've been a professional dancer for over a quarter of a century (an eternity in the dance world),  and while I love seeing any kind of dance in film, it's disheartening to contemplate that, by its nature, one's experience of dance in film is limited exclusively to the "display" aspect of the art. The finished product that is the result of the blood, sweat, and tears that is the creative process. In its ability to render visible the sublime and chimerical, dance has the power to make the illusion of perfection seem possible. That is its magic.

The flaw of dance is that, devoid of a glimpse into the human imperfection that creates such an illusion, too many people (most notably young girls lured by the romantic-fantasy, "little princess" fetishism side of classical ballet) find it all too easy to believe that perfection is actually an attainable goal. The striving for perfection in ballet is reflected in the constant dieting (did you check out that "ballerina breakfast" Portman has?) and damaged body image (Portman's character has a history of compulsive scratching) of so many dancers.

Shattered illusion: Broken music box dancer

I've seen many films that showed me what dance looks like, but Black Swan is the first and only film that reflected back to me my own experience of what it "feels" like to dance. How you can't expect to create anything meaningful unless you are brave enough to dig deep within yourself to unearth what lies beneath. Aronofsky has fashioned a film that is a visual representation of that transportive internal maelstrom  (with all its soul-searching, anguish, and conflict) that defines the creative process. A visible answer, if you will, to the question "Where does one have to go internally to create great art?" 

As is frequently the case with people in the performing arts, I am, at my core, a painfully shy person. I was a retiring bookworm who spent his high-school years undesirous of attention and terrified of being called on in class, I chewed my fingernails nervously and rarely looked people in the eye. Yet, in choosing a profession, I was drawn to something as emotionally revealing as dance. In it, I have had to regularly access and reveal parts of my inner self that were antithetical to who I am and how I was raised (VERY Catholic). Though the results occasionally surprise me to this day, no one seeing me dance would ever believe that I wasn't a born exhibitionist, lifelong extrovert, and passionate sensualist.

How is it possible? Take look at Black Swan for the answer.
Though highly-dramatized, the internal transformation necessary to turn a reserved personage like me into that passionate, expressive creature that is a dancer, can feel every bit as terrifying as the events in this film. That's why the events that unfold in Black Swan don't strike me as being intended for literal interpretation. The images and story feel like an operatically allegorical representation of the state of creative transformation and transcendence of self that is necessary to create the illusion of perfection that is dance.

Ballet as fetish: Dance de-romanticized

 PERFORMANCES

Much like the mentally disturbed character of Carol (Catherine Deneuve) in Polanski's Repulsion, Black Swan's Nina (Natalie Portman) is already a little off the barre before the film even begins. With no specifics given as to why she scratches herself or why she lives in a state of adolescent arrested development with her mother, we are left to pick out the clues of her past as the events of the present conspire to send her over the edge. Of course, the kicker is that we see the entire film from Nina's perspective, and, as a troubled young woman going through a paranoid identity crisis, she is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Since she has little grasp of what is real or imagined, neither do we. Welcome to the roller coaster ride.

Natalie Portman gives a truly fearless performance in Black Swan, totally deserving of all the awards heaped on her for her work. I thought she was amazing in Mike Nichols' Closer but she completely blew me away with her intensity here. She takes a very complex character in more-than-fantastic circumstances and makes you believe in (and even care about) what is happening to her.

The ballerina haunted by her obsession with perfection: One of my favorite images from the film

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I don't know why, but I'm a sucker for movies about identity and duality. Like Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek in 3 Women, there is something compelling about separate characters that embody an idealized whole. I love how Black Swan makes literal and stylistic use of reflections, doubles, and the distortions therein.

Mirrors are intriguing objects. They do nothing but reflect that which is before them, but at the same time, they seem to lie. They have the power to reflect back at us the gaze of another (without mirrors we have no idea how we look to someone else) but provocatively, that gaze must first be filtered through our own psyche. If we are self-enchanted, we are happy no matter what we see in the mirror. If we suffer insecurities, mirrors don't contradict us.

“They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities?”

Truman Capote  - Other Voices, Other Rooms

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

You can't make a movie about passion without displaying some yourself, and on that score, Black Swan is a seriously sexy success. The obvious physical beauty of Portman and her sensual doppelganger/rival Mila Kunis aside, there is some major heat generated by these women that is refreshing in its removal from the male gaze. Indeed, as the perspective of the film is exclusively that of the repressed Nina, the male gaze is frequently portrayed as repellent or predatory. What erotic underpinnings there are emanate from Nina's awakening to herself and exploring her own sexuality as exemplified by the comfortable carnality of her "Swan" double.

Sensual self-exploration: A dance with Rothbart? 

Although several of my dancer friends didn't care for Black Swan (I suspect because it didn't uphold the romanticized ideal of dance like say, The Turning Point, but almost anybody who knows my tastes in film and attitude toward dance could guess that it would wind up being one of my favorites. It crosses the identity theft themes of Robert Altman's 3 Women with Polanski's penchant for P.O.V. insanity, adds Martin Scorsese's fluid cinematography, and tops it all off with Ken Russell's taste for visual grandiosity.

I admire the film for the chances it takes in refusing to adhere to specific genre constructs and for not falling into the trap of over-explaining everything. I like that in this age of formulaic rom-coms and by-the-numbers action films, Black Swan is a movie that allows itself to be misunderstood. Everyone involved is so obviously invested in what they're doing that it makes it easy to put your trust in the film and allow it to take you wherever it takes you. Seeing it for the first time was a thrill that stayed with me long after. Seeing it several times again...I find the experience gets richer and more layered with each viewing.

"It was perfect."

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2011

CLOSER 2004

If the amoral bed-hoppers that make up the bulk of daytime tabloid talk shows were articulate, intelligent, impossibly attractive, and rich; their lives might be something like the lives of the four spiritually damaged protagonists of Closer, Mike Nichols' searing look at the pain people cause one another in the name of love.

Julia Roberts as Anna

Jude Law as Dan

Natalie Portman as Alice

Clive Owen as Larry

The tony trappings of upscale London fail to mask the rather ugly games of sexual one-upmanship that characterize the entwining relationships of the film's four lead characters. Based on a play by Patrick Marber (who wrote the equally perceptive and acidic Notes on a Scandal - 2006), Closer is a sexual roundelay that skewers romantic myth and lays waste those who narcissistically pursue love as though it were part of a self-improvement program. Here, the believers of love at first sight; those souls whose religion is passion, chemistry, and the heart wanting what it wants - are revealed to also be the ones most likely to grant themselves license to lie, deceive, and inflict pain. Provided it's all done in the name of love.

 

 

 

Changing Partners

Having explored the ins and outs of caustic relationships in both Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and Carnal Knowledge (1971),  Mike Nichols is cinema's unofficial frontline correspondent in the war between the sexes. With wit and candor, he goes to places of rare honesty in human relations and somehow finds ways of making us see parts of ourselves in some of the most odious characters. He has a gift for shining a compassionate but cold light on some of the worst aspects of human interaction and, in the process, reinforces the notion that sometimes, even at our most monstrous, most of us are rarely ever less than just human.

"Hello, Stranger"

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM:

The language. Though biting and brutal, the dialog in Closer is too clever to be real:

Portman: “I don’t eat fish.”
Law: “Why not?”
Portman: “Fish piss in the sea.”
Law: “So do children.”
Portman: “I don’t eat children, either."

- but direct and to the point in revealing character and the small ways we use words to protect ourselves, wound others, and ultimately conceal. The film is as much a treat for the ears as it is for the eyes.

The Truth: 

“Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off. But it’s better if you do.”

PERFORMANCES

Years before Black Swan Natalie Portman proved that she was more than just a sci-fi geek pinup. Though outrageously beautiful and possessing a natural star quality, Portman is refreshingly low on self-consciousness and unafraid to go to the uglier places a character might take her. Cast cannily as the kind of male fantasy dream girl she's been marketed as since her career began, Portman reveals levels of intelligence and will that are not often associated with waifish objects-of-affection. She is never less than compelling throughout and, for me at least, virtually wipes the rest of the accomplished cast off the screen.

 The Lie

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

At one point in the film, Portman's character describes rival Julia Roberts's photographic artwork as 

"A bunch of sad strangers photographed beautifully.” She might just as well have been talking about the film she's appearing in.

Closer is indeed a film about unpleasant people acting unpleasantly, but everyone is shot so lovingly they're practically incandescent. As a fan of vintage movies, my heart has a special place for that time in history (pre-late-50s realism) when movies were populated exclusively by those humanoid gods and goddesses we called movie stars. They didn't look like anyone we'd ever seen, and the world they inhabited onscreen didn't even remotely look like the one we inhabited. It was a hyper-reality that created a dreamscape to build fantasies on.

Closer, with its gleaming sets and uniformly gorgeous cast, uses old-time glamour to present a merciless look at the dark side of romantic desire. It's so effective in creating a kind of visual/emotional paradox that I can't help thinking it's a conscious creative choice on Nichols' part.  

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The one scene I never tire of watching is a sequence that takes place in a private room of a strip club where Natalie Portman and Clive Owen verbally spar about love, lust, and longing.

It is amazing on so many levels. From a purely technical standpoint, the astounding virtuosity of the camera angles alone makes for a unitary lesson in filmmaking.

It's funny, tense, sexy as hell, and oddly moving as these two enact a mating dance of the lonely.

It certainly doesn't hurt that Natalie Portman sets the screen aflame, either.

WOW!

WHAT FUELED MY DREAMS

From everything I've written thus far, I've made it sound as though Closer were an anti-romantic comedy (black comedy) and basically down on love. The truth is, like that other favorite of mine, Two for the Road, Closer is at its core a deeply romantic film. Chiefly because it dares to show the bare bones of relationships and dramatizes the hard work and self-sacrifice necessary to achieve true intimacy with another. The four protagonists in Closer all fumble about blindly seeking love without knowing how to return it, demanding love without earning it, and giving love without committing to it.

Love Gets Ugly 

It deflates the popular romantic ideal (one favored by movie love stories) of the instant attraction, the animal connection that sparks all great romances. Closer dares to posit that those who indulge this conceit are fantasists in love with the idea of love and are unprepared (or lack the maturity) to do the hard work required if one hopes to grow "closer" to another individual.
To my way of thinking, a film like Closer gives love the respect it deserves.

Not everybody has the stomach for movies like this. Indeed, the public stayed well away from this film when it was released. But the relationships I grew up around (and I dare say a good many of the relationships I see today) look more like the ones depicted here than the inherently dishonest, wish-fulfillment fantasies of The Bridges of Madison County or Under the Tuscan Sun. That may be my curse or blessing; I don't know. But what I do know is that I've seen more tears shed and people hurt over the pursuit of false ideals than I ever have over people coming to terms with the fact that love takes courage, selflessness, and a willingness to be vulnerable.

Law: “Deception is brutal. I’m not pretending otherwise”

Closer is an adult story about the responsibilities of real love. That it tells its story with wit, intelligence, and style only serves to make it one of my fave-rave films of all time. A modern realist classic.

Natalie Portman - Stopping Traffic

Copyright © Ken Anderson    2009 - 2011