Nichols says the beauty of 'Closer' is the plot
Only the gorgeous got cast in ''Closer," Mike Nichols's new movie: Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Clive Owen, and Natalie Portman costar. The director says he barely noticed the per-pound beauty ratio. He says no one else would, either.
''You forget right away," Nichols said. ''You forget because they're your friends and they're people. Yes, they're beautiful. But the thing is I've known a number of beautiful people because of my job. I'm married to one [television journalist Diane Sawyer]. And the first thing they learn is to keep giving it back, to say 'Don't worry, don't worry, I'm not a threat, I'm no better than you, we're all alike.' "
Then again, Nichols also says most people share similarities with the characters in ''Closer," characters who lie, deceive, and leave their lovers in pain. He says the fault isn't in their bad behavior. It's that the happy times are left to the audience's imagination.
''I like them all; see, I'm useless," Nichols said. ''They're my friends and I don't think they're terrible people. I think they seem much more terrible than they are, in part because we cut out the happy parts . . . and we're looking back on the leavings . . .," breakups almost too painful to watch.
''As [Broadway legend] Elaine May pointed out when she saw this, 'They don't make their case, these people,' " he continued. ''They don't say the things that people say when they're getting ready to give the bad news. They don't put any spin on it. They just tell the truth when they want to leave. But so do a lot of people."
Nichols says what attracted him to ''Closer," originally a stage play with an all-British cast, was the sick feeling he got reading one particular plotline. The photographer played by Roberts has told her new husband, a dermatologist played by Owen, that she is leaving him for Law, an obituary writer for a London newspaper who lives with Portman's stripper. Owen absorbs the news, suffers, and eventually formulates a plan to win back his woman and ruin the other guy.
''That scene really upset me. It's such an extreme of the horror of leaving someone and the horror of being left, the twin horrors, and the apparent absolute finality of it," Nichols said.
But of course it isn't over. There's that vengeful plan, and Nichols says that intrigued him even more: ''I thought, 'That's a really good story.' "
Nichols, 73, whose film resume runs from ''Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" to ''Angels in America," considered making the movie version of ''Closer" with English accents. But even he wondered whether audiences would buy Roberts as a Brit. So the women became Americans abroad and romantic confusion abounds. As Nichols notes, their beauty doesn't spare them a thing.
LYNDA GOROV 