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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.