When Talk Is Sexier Than a Clichéd Clinch -- By A. O. SCOTT

Like most interesting movies about sex, "Closer," Mike Nichols's deft film adaptation of a well-known play by Patrick Marber, is mostly talk. There are still a few filmmakers - not all of them French - who are capable of infusing the bodily expressions of erotic desire with dramatic force and psychological meaning, but the vast majority are content with a few moments of sheet-twisting and peek-a-boo montage.

In the past, Mr. Nichols has usually addressed sexuality with an elegant mixture of candor and discretion, and his intention in "Closer," which brings him back to the raw, needy emotions of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and "Carnal Knowledge," seems to be to show very little while saying a great deal. There is some display of skin: one of the characters, after all, is a stripper (another happens to be a dermatologist) and a pivotal scene unfolds in her place of work. But even that moment is less memorable for Natalie Portman's near-nudity than for the emotional self-exposure of the fully clothed Clive Owen.

The verbal intercourse that dominates that scene and every other in the film is vigorous, compulsive, sometimes painful and occasionally funny, as well as more stimulating - for the characters, one suspects, as much as the audience - than the physical intercourse that is its frequent subject. It is also mannered, schematic and frequently improbable, defects in Mr. Marber's play that Mr. Nichols and his strenuously engaged cast labor mightily to overcome.

Although "Closer" moves gracefully through the streets and rooms of contemporary London, it never quite shakes off the stasis and claustrophobia that haunt even the best screen adaptations of self-conscious, over-reaching serious drama. At times, the smooth naturalism of Mr. Nichols's direction emphasizes the archness and artificiality of Mr. Marber's dialogue and the unreality of the people speaking it.

Nonetheless, those people, though they are increasingly difficult to like, do manage to command a degree of curious attention. There are four of them, free-floating representatives of the disconnected contemporary tribe of wandering city-dwellers, arranged by Mr. Marber (who wrote the screenplay) and Mr. Nichols into a tight, ever-shifting grid of jealousy, longing and deceit.

The opening sequence is a barbed variation on the romantic comedy cliché of "meeting cute." Ms. Portman, playing Alice, a transplanted American, ambles along a crowded sidewalk. Walking toward her is Jude Law, whose character, Dan, is a newspaper obituary writer with literary aspirations. Their eyes lock across an intersection, into which Alice steps - looking, as Americans will, in the wrong direction. The taxicab that knocks her down is a hulking metaphor for the narrative that follows, in which Alice and Dan - along with Larry (Mr. Owen) and Anna (Julia Roberts), whose own cute meeting via mistaken identity and the Internet soon follows - collide by accident, continually blindsided by one another and by their own feelings.

Mr. Nichols cleverly communicates their disequilibrium by detaching their stories from the usual chronological guideposts. Sometimes the cut from one scene to the next will leap across months or even years, and rather than signal the jump with words on the screen, the film keeps us guessing about how much time has passed until a line of dialogue supplies a clue. A great deal of significant action takes place off screen, in those temporal gaps, and what we are witnessing are premonitions and repercussions - the flirting that precedes and the fighting that follows.

One effect of this dislocation is to endow a very simple story with a feeling of complication and surprise. Unlike most movie love stories, "Closer" does have the virtue of unpredictability. The problem is that, while parts are provocative and forceful, the film as a whole collapses into a welter of misplaced intensity. Larry, Dan, Alice and Anna seem to find themselves in a constant state of emotional extremity, in part because the quiet, everyday moments of their lives have been pruned away, but for precisely that reason their tears and rants seem arbitrary and a little absurd.

They are four characters in search of an objective correlative, their intimacies obstructed by lofty words - honesty, cowardice, love - that seem, after a while, to mean nothing at all. When the two official couples, their relationships threatened by symmetrical unofficial coupling, reach their climactic confrontations, it's hard not to wonder, "What on earth are they so worked up about?"

That question becomes more acute, and more damaging, when you step back to ask yourself who these people are and why you should care about them. Neither question gets much of a satisfactory answer. We know that the women are American, the men English, and allusions to past relationships and class backgrounds pop up now and then, but these four theoretical beings dwell mainly in a state of isolation amounting nearly to abstraction, without friends, families, legible pasts or probable futures. They exist only from moment to moment and only in relation to one another.

This places an enormous burden on the actors, who must in effect forge personalities out of thin air and vague language. The only one who succeeds is Mr. Owen, whose volcanic charisma is hedged - and to some extent subverted - by a flash of rugged wit. Faced with such a rival, Mr. Law wisely declines to defend the "Sexiest Man Alive" title recently conferred on him by the discerning folks at People magazine. Instead, he dismantles the smooth, ingratiating persona that has brought him to the brink of being a movie star and in the process reclaims his legitimacy as a nimble and clever actor.

Ms. Roberts tries to do something similar, but with less satisfying results. Anna, whose serial deceptions of Larry and Dan seem, for a time, to be driving the narrative, is a smudgily written character to begin with - watchful, morose, yet somehow able to compel her would-be lovers and herself into self-destructive fits of passion. In the name of seriousness, Ms. Roberts suppresses her natural radiance, as if the admonition Do Not Smile were imprinted in heavy black ink on every page of her script.

Her ability to neutralize her own considerable magnetism is impressive, even admirable, but it is also self-defeating. Ms. Roberts may be bored with her own power to attract, but Anna's inertia weakens the already tenuous logic of Mr. Marber's play.

Which leaves Alice, the character in whom Mr. Marber's worst failings and Mr. Nichols's best instincts coalesce. By now (but also in 1997, when the play was first performed), the tough-yet-vulnerable stripper is worse than a cliché, and Ms. Portman bravely tackles the acrobatic challenge of simultaneously inviting and deflecting the audience's prurient, fascinated gaze. Her soft, wobbly features emphasize Alice's childishness, making her performance both the most sympathetic in "Closer" and the most troubling. She awakens a queasy protective impulse, a fantasy of rescue that is all the more powerful for being confused.

Do you want to save poor Alice from the toxic intimacy that Dan, Anna and Larry offer, or do you want Ms. Portman to escape from a movie that, in spite of the teasing promise of its title, does everything it can to push you away.

"Closer" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for a great deal of graphic talk and a few visually suggestive moments.

'Closer'

Opens today nationwide.

Directed by Mike Nichols; written by Patrick Marber, based on his play; director of photography, Stephen Goldblatt; edited by John Bloom and Antonia Van Drimmelen; production designer, Tim Hatley; produced by Mr. Nichols, John Calley and Cary Brokaw; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 110 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Natalie Portman (Alice), Jude Law (Dan), Julia Roberts (Anna) and Clive Owen (Larry).

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