"Did you swallow his cum?"
"Yes."
"How did it taste? How did it taste?!"
"It tastes like you, but sweeter!"
"That’s the spirit. Thank you. Thank you for your honesty. Now fuck off and die."

If Mike Nichols and Patrick Marber are to be understood, all couples may not eventually have an exchange like the foregoing, but it’s perfectly plausible that at least one will. This is bad news. People talk. Amy Sohn writes a column in New York magazine, example begets phenomenon... Next thing you know, men are the new masochists, women are the new sadists, and everyone is subsisting without therapy. This may be the most unsettling notion in a film that purports to be jam-packed with them. There’s plenty of strange love going around, yet the only doctor in the house is a dermatologist -- and he’s the one asking about the cum.

It’s unclear whether staging Dan and Alice’s formal introduction in a hospital waiting room was an act of foreshadowing, labored idiosyncrasy, or just a way of giving the two a shared ain't-we-sweet? anecdote for talking the rest of the cast into bed. A few immediate hints, however, told me right away just what Dan was up against in the shape of Alice. With her dyed orange locks and retro-funky jacket (blue suede, yak hair trim: Paul Weller’s duds in Antarctica), I got the awkward sense I’d been down this swooning rabbit hole before. Wasn’t Alice the adorable nightmare that gave Jim Carrey such agita in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Beautiful, charming, and like everything mixed together in her probable medicine cabinet, highly contraindicated. The thinking man’s crush of the season is the advertised damaged good, so let it never be said that we couldn’t see this coming. Alice unselfconsciously rifles through Dan’s suitcase looking for cigarettes while he’s out getting coffee. She gleefully marvels at the corners cut off his fish sandwich, which sandwich is wrapped in foil, beneath which foil would not be where any sensible person would keep his cigarettes. Alice, in other words, is a snoop. And she is the worst kind of snoop: the one who thinks she’s being endearing and cutely bold when she’s scarily detonating personal boundaries with strangers. Hello, indeed.

But hold it right there. This was the moment for our good samaritan, returning to witness Alice’s unlawful bag-creep, to polish off his magnanimity with a paid ER bill, a few cautious words about the sinistral nature of British traffic, then high-tail it the hell back to work, tout court. We are not without sympathy for the Earl Grey routine of Dan’s existence. He writes obituaries. His current girlfriend is a linguist. OK, that says it all to me, too. But he really needed to trust his better judgment on this one. Looking like Jude Law practically guarantees future curbside damsels, many even prostrating themselves into varied and interesting positions of distress for Dan’s benefit. And did I mention that Alice is a stripper?

I haven’t read Marber’s play, but I’d imagine the pole-dancing conceit was just as yawned-over then for what it was, is and always will be: the worst first-shelf tenderizer a clumsy writer can reach for when faced with a tough piece of sirloin. “Look how fragile. How confused. Save her.” Yeah, yeah. That and a Mastercard still won’t get you sex in the champagne room. You’ll have to wait til quittin' time to take the strippers home in Closer’s mimetic universe. Many were the moments (clear heels! clear heels!) that left me wondering when the subject of Anna’s graduate degree was going to come up.

A lot of ink has been spilled over Queen Amygdala’s unwillingness to show skin in her flicks, and much of it (the ink) over how cumbrous this makes tackling the role of a g-string nymphet. In the most unforgettable scene in the film, in a strip club, deft camerawork and the ponderous eclipse of Clive Owen’s damnably big head are all that not only keep Natalie Portman’s reputation in tact, but Sharon Stone’s as well. To her credit, I was never quite sure whether Alice’s body or words writhed and slivered with greater forensic suasiveness. This scene -- like its counterparts in real life strip clubs, or, you know, so I’ve been told -- is a game of one-sided role-playing, with Larry (Owen) as the wounded and pathetic pounder on the transactional fourth wall. Injury and pathos are necessary preconditions for his summoning of alpha strengths, as we later learn, but for now all Larry wants are answers. Anna (Julia Roberts) has left him for Dan who has ditched Alice for Anna. To Larry, Alice is revenge itself. Try telling her this: “I’m not going to be your revenge fuck,” she says. Sorry, what was that about an MBA in two years? The game is too well underway, but Alice can’t leave coital determinism well enough alone. “Lying,” she tells her neurasthenic, cash-hemorrhaging client in a rare bearing of soul instead of crotch, “is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off -- but it’s better if you do.”

Well, with wisdom like that it’s hard to argue for reconciliation, monogamy or even less voulu modes of deception and betrayal (the lipstick-stained shirt collar comes to mind.) “Look closer,” you may recall, was the magic eye-like enticement for seeing American Beauty, a sclerotic satire whose vast reserves of cliché and falsity were actually quite detectable from miles away. (A vigorous “nailing” of modern suburbia eludes us still.) Now imagine the inherent danger in writing specifically, exclusively about desire. What abraded, brambly warrens of cliché and falsity would you want to avoid? The big one seems self-evident: wardrobe malfunction. You must never dress up your theme as something higher or nobler than it is. In the telescoped coming attractions and going repulsions of celluloid, any attempt at this quickly degenerates into sentimentality or unwitting farce. It’s an indicator of promise, then, that a film about desire should be motivated more by human distance than proximity. Closer is an ironic title for a movie that aims to drive a wedge between every pair it involves, and though most of the film’s turmoil is cleverly cooked up out of sight, during tumescent off-camera periods of absence and longing, we’re meant to believe that the characters’ emotional alphabet ranges beyond an elementary “a” to “c” -- affection to contempt. There’s a weepy meltdown or two, some all-purpose chatter about abiding loyalty and virtue, but make no mistake: potions that are drunk of siren (and satyr) tears are done so because intoxication is a fix for these people. Listen again to their dialogue:

“I slept with someone in New York -- a whore.”
“Why did you tell me?”
“Because I couldn’t lie to you.”
“It’s fine.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Why are you?”
“Because I’m selfish and I think I’ll be happier with her.”

“I treat you like a whore?”
“Sometimes.”
“Why would that be?”

It’s as if David Mamet and Woody Allen had a self-parody contest. Who talks like this? And by the way, the one who gets treated like a whore is the one who finds it okay that her partner recently slept with a bona fide practitioner; Anna's not exactly been Suzy Homemaker while Larry's been away, as the “why would that be?” cuttingly and too coolly demonstrates. These words, however, peal with froideur and moral nullity. The actors look silly or uncomfortable speaking them. Larry wants to know where and how Anna and Dan did it in his apartment. Anna, after insufficiently little needling, tells him. In detail. Is this “edgy” scriptwriting or the standard lingo of a faddish new paradox in cinema: the unfolding of the psychosexual mellow-drama? People capable of such detachment, such cultivated menace under the exigencies of adultery and break-up, are not likely to be too bummed about adultery and break-up to begin with. “It’s fine.” There’s your replacement hiding under the bed. Actually, more like relaxing. Lock the door on your way out, please. It’s not you, it’s me. Whatever.

If Larry and Anna and Dan and Alice were portrayed as happy voluptuaries, that’d be one thing. But they’re not. They’re portrayed as understandably flawed, regular people who don’t deserve what happens to them. All presumed entitlements to self-pity, manifest in frequent convulsions of how-could-you narcissism, are completely rubbished by the ridiculous fugue states of communal fucking to which these characters inevitably recur. When Dan’s with Anna he intuits, and then acts shocked by, the fact that she’s recently slept with Larry again. More convincing would have been Dan’s shock that Anna hadn’t recently slept with Larry again (“Are you feeling all right, honey?”). That’s just the kind of gal Anna is. She’s supposed to be conflicted and tortured, yet unlike most people who legitimately fall under that category, she never lies -- putatively out of respect for her homme du jour, an admirable insistence that he know the truth about his up-to-the-minute competition. This is conflict and torture, all right: the kind that gets resolved by ordering a Diet Coke with a double bacon cheeseburger.

In a way, I’m glad it's Mike Nichols who initiates the countdown sequence of our mutual assured erotic destruction. His resume reads like a commissioned Freudian study on stimulation and its discontents, and his findings never shy from indictment. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf: the 50’s. The Graduate: mom. Carnal Knowledge: give me a break. The Birdcage: Republicans. Angels in America: AIDS and Republicans. Closer finally comes clean and tries to pin the blame where it belongs, squarely on ourselves. This might have worked, too, had the elected representatives of a wide pathology been more representative and less narrowly pathological.