Closer.

I'm massively fatigued due to an international flight, but I will forget everything if I don't remember it now.

The 2004 film Closer boasts an all-star cast and a plot so psychologically twisted as to be inscrutable. I've seen it twice now but have come to differing conclusions both times.

Clive Owen's character is at once animalistically sexual and brutally honest--I think that if we are to sympathize with any of the movie's characters, we would have to root for him. He's tough, he's real. He doesn't skirt around issues of infidelity. He doesn't hide behind false modesty. There's something admirable in that, right?--even in the crude way he approaches human intimacy, in his fits of violent rage?

Maybe. Meanwhile, I kind of wish we could all be Natalie Portman, and we could all giggle and make bold assumptions of permanence and innocence. Why is she a stripper? What is there in her commodification of sexuality that allows her to idealize romance so? (Some random critic says that her vitality brings out both the best and worst in her costars, but I'm not sure if this is true. It seems more to me that her simplicity is easy for others to essentialize.)

--And Julia Roberts and her martyr complex, Jude Law the obscure and sometimes all-too-witting romantic-hero freak with moral pretenses shoved up his ass. These people are so complex that I can't make any sweeping generalizations of anything, but I would like so badly to dissect their characteristics and make sense of the "subtext." All I know is that it's a movie about deception vs. honesty, love, sexual politics. Things are cruel, but life is cruel, and splayed out on the screen, human nature is not much better than animal nature (perhaps even worse in its potential for duplicity?).

"Have you seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood!" -- what Clive Owen says to Jude Law, pityingly. We are all flesh and blood, flesh and blood and passion and pain. Writers like Law might try to make things better, smooth over the edges, but art (so we are told by both Portman and Owen) is a lie. It makes ugly things beautiful. Closer isn't a beautiful movie, but its atavism and its cruelty are both much more intriguing than beauty could ever be.