MIKE NICHOLS'S latest movie, "Closer," adapted from a play by the British dramatist Patrick Marber, is about four people, arranged in crisscrossing couples, who spend most of two hours slicing one another to bits with witty and vengeful repartee. In this respect it is a lot like his first movie, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," which in 1966 was adapted from Edward Albee's celebrated play, which to this day remains unequalled in its portrayal of heterosexuality as a form of ritualized verbal blood sport.

Looking at the two films side by side can create a vertiginous, time-warp feeling. In the space of 38 years, everything has changed - Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton have been replaced by Julia Roberts and Jude Law, swearing and nudity have supplanted euphemism and double-entendre, and the claustrophobia of suburban marriage has given way to the anomie of Internet chat rooms and feckless metrosexuality - and yet at the same time everything seems now pretty much as it was then. In tracing a route from Mr. Albee's pastoral American college town to Mr. Marber's cosmopolitan London, Mr. Nichols seems to have come full circle.

Or perhaps he has been there all along. Certainly, apart from a hiatus in the late 70's, when he worked mainly in the theater, Mr. Nichols has been a presence in American movies for as long as many of us can remember, and he has been a fixture of American popular culture, thanks to his erstwhile improvisational partnership with Elaine May, for even longer. He was nominated for the best director Oscar twice in the 60's and twice in the 80's, winning on his second try, for "The Graduate" in 1968. His recent work for HBO has won him two Emmys, for "Wit" and "Angels in America." Born in Berlin in 1931, he is one of a handful of active American directors - Robert Altman and Clint Eastwood also come to mind - who find themselves, in their 70's, with careers in full and hectic bloom.

But Mr. Nichols's career is nonetheless something of a puzzle. And not because his movies are difficult or abstruse. On the contrary, they are distinguished by a clarity and accessibility that sometimes make it easy to take them for granted. The frequency and facility with which he adapts other peoples' material make Mr. Nichols's own sensibility hard to pin down, and he has never been one to make grand claims for himself as an artist. Although his films of the 1960's and 70's seemed to define (if also to mock) the attitudes of a rebellious generation, he did not really fit in with the wild children of the New Hollywood. Directors like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Mr. Altman were self-styled and critically designated mythmakers, visionaries and iconoclasts, whereas at his best Mr. Nichols has always been an observer, an adapter and an ironist.

Taste, fashion and social arrangements may mutate and evolve, but in Mr. Nichols's movies, the comedy and cruelty of human relations - at work, at home, at parties, in bed - remain pretty much constant. Over the course of a long and varied career, he has shown an abiding interest in observing the cruelty and a superior knack for choreographing the comedy. This is not to suggest that his work as a filmmaker, to say nothing of his extensive résumé in the theater, is all of a piece. Among the comedies of romantic, domestic and professional manners - "The Graduate," "Carnal Knowledge," "Working Girl," "Heartburn," "Primary Colors" and "The Birdcage" - are strewn examples of morally serious melodrama ("Silkwood," "Regarding Henry"), anarchic satire ("Catch-22") and even some sensitive sci-fi sea creatures ("The Day of the Dolphin"). He has, with exemplary discretion and professionalism, brought the work of worthy playwrights like Neil Simon, Tony Kushner and Margaret Edson to screens large and small.

Mr. Nichols has also been, apart from a few early missteps, a wonderfully self-confident technician. It is easy to underrate his movies, and in some ways they deserve to be underrated: none of them leaps out as a neglected masterpiece. But even the most negligible or misguided - "What Planet Are You From?" in which Garry Shandling played a lovelorn space alien with a buzzing penis, or "Heartburn," in which the only thing worse than Meryl Streep's marriage was her hair - are hard to turn away from when they turn up on cable. Mr. Nichols has never pretended he was a genius, but he has also refused to dumb himself down, and the identifying trait that runs through his movies - the thing that makes them, in spite of their deference to mightier authorial imaginations, recognizably his - may be a modest, unobtrusive but nonetheless palpable intelligence.

His camera seems drawn to characters who, whether they are designated villains or heroes, perceive themselves to be smart, with all of the complications such perception involves. They also tend to be both vain and self-critical, and to overestimate or overvalue their own intelligence. Mr. Law's character in "Closer," an obituary writer with aspirations to be a novelist, is one such person: too clever by half and a wit at his own expense. He joins a packed rogue's gallery of hyper-articulate talkers and hypertrophied intellects that includes Mr. Burton in "Who's Afraid," Emma Thompson in "Wit," Sigourney Weaver in "Working Girl," Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate," the entire cast of "Primary Colors," all the non-Mormon characters in "Angels in America," and Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep whenever they have showed up in a Nichols project.

A glance at this list, and at the daunting array of actors who have worked with him over the years, many repeatedly, suggests that Mr. Nichols is not only smart but also the cause of intelligence in others. One of the reasons his movies reliably yield pleasure in spite of their limitations is the quality of the acting on display. With a few exceptions - Ms. Streep in "Silkwood," Ms. Thompson in "Wit," Al Pacino in "Angels" - these are not actorly tours de force of the kind that provokes widespread weeping and awards-giving. But they are performances that you turn to with surprise and relief for their reminders that screen acting, though it can scale heights of grand emotion, can also capture the middle registers of human feeling and behavior.

Mr. Nichols roams freely across this middle ground, staking out a territory bounded on one end by cynicism, on the other by sentimentality. He has, on occasion, strayed too far in either direction, but most of the time he calculates the distances pretty well. His mockery is nearly always leavened by tolerance, and his moments of uplift tempered by an acute sense of imperfection. All of this is to say that while his films are not all, strictly speaking, comedies - "Closer," for one, is too full of anguish to fit the usual definition - his temperament is essentially comic. And the individual scenes and bits of acting you recall most vividly - from Anne Bancroft's seduction of Mr. Hoffman in "The Graduate" to Nathan Lane's seduction of Gene Hackman in "The Birdcage" - are not only funny, but funny in a way that suggests an underlying pathos based on miscommunication and confused desire.

This kind of comedy used to be a staple of American moviemaking, a bulwark, I'm tempted to say, of the liberal, middle-class civilization that has provided the setting for most of Mr. Nichols's films and that may have entered a period of terminal decadence. And though Mr. Nichols may not be precisely that civilization's "designated mourner" - a role he assumed in one of his rare recent in-front-of-the-camera appearances, in David Hare's 1997 adaptation of Wallace Shawn's play of that name - he seems, more and more, to be a survivor and something of a throwback. The fact of his German birth and Russian-Jewish parentage links him to the great generation of Central European émigrés whose style and sophistication imported both classicism and modernity to Hollywood's studio era. Mr. Nichols may be the last of a venerable line that stretches from Ernst Lubitsch through Billy Wilder. He is, if you'll forgive the pun, a tamer Wilder in a wilder time. His films have offered mild provocation, but more consistently, and especially over the last 20 years, they have dispensed reassurance, sometimes to the point of complacency: the working girl will find her way to the top; Henry's heart will be healed, along with heartburn, addiction and dirty politics. Even those illnesses for which no cure exists - cancer, AIDS, homophobia - offer some hope of redemption and resolution.

Wilder, a fatalist working in the world's capital of optimism, was able to allow a darker, more severe view of human nature to peak through even his sunniest vistas, and what makes Mr. Nichols more than just another feel-good hack is his implicit acknowledgement that the structure of comedy is an artifice, built to contain and exclude real, incurable unpleasantness. In his most memorable films, the artifice holds, but barely: at some point, you will catch a glimpse of the selfishness and cruelty that lie beneath a surface that seems so polished and civilized. "Angels in America," his most ambitious recent work, is about the decision to live as though the world were comic - which is to say, secular, forgiving, forward-looking - in the face of growing evidence that it is, more often and more fundamentally, the opposite. The most remarkable thing about "Closer," without giving too much away, is that, in the end, its plot conforms to the basic rules of comedy without offering much in the way of consolation, in effect stripping away the very illusions its characters belatedly discover are necessary for anything like happiness.

Which makes "Closer" sound even more like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Maybe, instead of coming full circle, Mike Nichols has gone back and started over.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company