Alice (Natalie Portman), a stripper who claims she’s a waitress, and Dan (Jude Law), an obituary writer who wants to be a novelist, meet each other in the street in London while making flirtatious eye contact. She then gets hit by a car and when she regains consciousness, she greets him with a seductive "Hello, stranger".
Anna (Julia Roberts), a photographer, and Larry (Clive Owen, whose deep set eyes remind us so much of Richard Gomez), a dermatologist, has an even cuter meeting. Larry sees Ana in the London Aquarium and thinks she is the trash-talking woman he met in a cybersex chat room. Was he embarrassed when he found out he was set up by Dan. Take note that the stars are two British men and two American women.
After these amusing meetings, the film takes a sharp turn and turns into a taxing drama about about lovers who cheat on each other and whose relationship become very bitter. Although Dan is already living with Alice, he gets so enamoured with Anna who has chosen to marry Larry. When the betrayals are discovered by their partners, the love that formerly binds them becomes poison that makes them do some very ugly things. This is one of the most emotionally violent films you’d ever see, with its dialogue very frank and brutal. The film is based on a play, so it’s understandably very talky. We’re sure local viewers who are more plotoriented will be turned off by the proceedings on screen. But if you’re appreciative of good acting, no doubt you’d enjoy the performances here, even if the story has no fairy tale ending where the lead characters live happily ever after.
Julia Roberts approaches her role with a maturity we have not seen in her before. Her performance is a beautiful exercise in understatement. As the childish Dan, Jude Law gives the weakest portrayal, aggravated by the fact that he’s playing a basically annoying character as a man without scruples. He’s actually more effective in the remake of "Alfie" where he plays another womanizer.
It’s really Clive Owen and Natalie Portman who excel here. No wonder they got nominated in the Oscar and won as best supporting actor and actress in the Golden Globe (when they are actually playing lead roles.) As the forever insecure Larry, Owen is given a number of compelling emotional highlights, like when he demands from Julia all the sexual details of lovemaking with Jude and in that scene in the club where she uses Alice to take revenge on Dan. The intensity of his anguish is electrifyingly painted on the screen.
Portman makes the best impression as Alice, a role so vastly different from her Queen Amidala in "Star Wars." She is the first to appear on screen while walking like a carefree waif on the crowded street of London. The film also ends on her with her now walking with more sexuality, making heads turn in New York City. She is truly in love with Dan and what happened to them has a marked effect on her as even the way she walks is now different, what with her naivete and innocence now gone and corrupted.
In truth, all the characters are far from being sympathetic and we don’t really get to care for them. But this is familiar territory for Director Mike Nichols, who has previously done films about tortured human relationships like "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf", "Carnal Knowledge" and "Heartburn." After watching this film, you’d no longer be surprised why divorce is so rampant in the U.S. To prevent love from quickly becoming sour and turning into hostility, it’s important to nurture it. If one is dead serious in cultivating interpersonal relations, there are many support groups a couple can join to save their relationship, How we wish there’d soon be a movie that will show how counseling and attending sharing meetings can help couples enhance their marriage better. They don’t really need to be cruel to each other like the couples in "Closer" do with glee.
* * *
IT STARTS as a truly suspenseful thriller, but in its last half hour, "Hide and Seek", crashes with a gimmicky plot device that is too difficult to believe, making the whole film quite reprehensible. The film pairs Oscarwinner Robert De Niro with the busiest child actress in Hollywood today, Dakota Fanning, who we first saw as the victim of incest in an episode of "CSI" then went into films like "I Am Sam", "Uptown Girls" and "Man on Fire". She’ll next be seen with Tom Cruise in "War of the Worlds".
De Niro plays David Callaway, a psychiatrist in New York City whose wife (Amy Irving) commits suicide by slitting her wrists in the bathtub in the film’s pre-title sequences. Their only daughter, Emily (Dakota), is traumatized by the tragedy and, to help her forget, David moves her to a new home in upstate New York where he hopes they’ll both have a fresh new start. But Emily has become even more quiet and withdrawn. When David becomes friendly with a divorcee (Elizabeth Shue), she resents it and exhibits unabashed hostility. She dumps her favorite doll and says she has a new friend, Charlie, who David thinks is just an imaginary friend.
But Charlie becomes nasty we start to suspect he might be an evil spirit. He writes graffiti on the bathroom wall blaming David for the death of his wife and also kills their cat. A female psychiatrist (Famke Janssen), advises David to take Emily to the hospital for further treatment, but he is optimistic he’ll still be able to resolve things by himself. "Just give me two weeks," he tells her.
When a character in the film gets killed, David realizes that Charlie is someone he simply can no longer ignore. And this is where the film takes an incredibly stupid turn, just to give us the obligatory plot twist that we don’t totally expect.
The script by Ari Schlossberg is really stupid, but if you’re a very gullible viewer, you might still buy its idiocy even if it raises too many questions that it all fails to answer. It really defies logic and has no respect for our intelligence. All the while, it tries to give us the wrong clues, even introducing a couple of neighbors (Melissa Leo and Robert John Burke) who have their own distressing memories about their own dead child.
We love good mysteries but this movie, dumbly directed by John Polson of "Swimfan" (which was a pale copy of "Fatal Attraction"), simply stinks. After the surprise twist in one of the major characters is revealed, the story is still made to drag on and on for about ten minutes before the final ending which suggests that Dakota’s character has also developed a split personality like the film’s main villain. The only thing we like is John Ottman’s properly ominous musical score.
Dakota’s performance is the best thing in the film as she fully inhabits her creepy character. But we believe she was psychologically exploited in her role as Emily. She is made to endure a lot of sick things that we hope won’t affect her off cam. Dakota is so good even in displaying her glassy eyed look that she out acts De Niro all the time. It’s not De Niro’s fault, though, as he is given a thankless role (mainly for breadtrip) that requires him to do some imbecilic things that don’t make sense. It’s good he just came from a bigger hit like "Meet the Fockers" so doing his execrable role here (as bad as his role in "Godsend") will hopefully not really damage his career. He must be the most clueless psychiatrist ever since his weirdo daughter exhibits various signs of being disturbed and yet he does very little about it. You actually come out of the theater after watching this movie feeling you’ve been cheated. It’s really rare for a scary movie to really scare as these days!. Nothing in "The Ring", "Gothika", "White Noise", "The Grudge" or "Boogeyman" really scared us. Honestly, we’d rather have the local film, "Feng Shui", anytime.
