(2004) You can hear someone saying he loves you. But where is it? If you can't see it or taste it or smell it … if you can't feel it … is it possible? If for no other reason, see this movie to hear Damien Rice's song, "The Blower's Daughter." But there are many good reasons for watching director Mike Nichols's film, based on Patrick Marber's screenplay, an adaptation of his play.

A beautiful young woman, with crimson-dyed short hair, steps off the curb in London and gets struck by a passing vehicle. To Daniel Woolf (Jude Law), who can't keep his eyes off her, she says she's Alice Ayres (Natalie Portman), an American just arrived from New York, having left someone and her job as a stripper, unaware that the English "traffic tends to come from the right."

Fortunately, her injury isn't serious (a few stitches in the leg). He works for a newspaper writing obituaries, "the Siberia of journalism," and has a girlfriend.

No matter since the next we see of him he's having a photo session for the dust jacket of his first novel, based on Alice's life, with whom he's now living. The photographer, Anna Cameron (Julia Roberts), also an American, married but separated, who has read an advance copy of the book (he takes her suggestion for changing the title to The Aquarium, a good place for picking up strangers), asks about his stealing another person's life for his fiction. Borrowing, he corrects, unless her photographs of strangers is also stealing.

After the two strangers - she's judgmental, he's devious - kiss (Dan begging to see more of her), Alice arrives and requests a photo session as well (she's overheard the conversation - Is that stealing?).

Online in a chat room, DDW (calling himself Anna) excites Larry, a dermatologist, with dirty talk before arranging for a rendezvous at the London Aquarium where the doctor by chance meets Anna: "I think you're the victim of a practical joke."

Four months later (a year since the scene in the studio) Dan and Alice attend Anna's photo exhibition where Alice, in front of a huge portrait of herself, talks to Larry, now Anna's boyfriend. Alice comments on the images as a big lie of sad, lonely people made to look beautiful and fascinating to people who think that's what art's supposed to be. Larry says to Anna that Alice has "the moronic beauty of youth," but she's "sly." (Dan had said his euphemism for her would be "disarming.")

Another year later, Dan confesses to Alice - "How do you do this to someone?" - that he's been seeing Anna, who's now married to Larry, ever since the photography show. "Why isn't love enough?" she asks of her selfish lover. Meanwhile, Anna, who'd been a partner in the "exquisite deception," informs Larry, just back from a dermatological conference in New York (where he confesses to an indiscretion), that she's leaving him - "You're making the mistake of your life" - for Dan (whom they'd called "Cupid" as a joke).

After grilling Anna about the details of her sexual relations with Dan, Larry goes to a strip club where he discovers a platinum blonde with the face of an angel and the gate to paradise. In a private room, willing to share her body's most intimate places with any paying stranger (but no touching), she cheekily performs whatever he asks of her, yet each time he demands of her her real name she replies with "Jane Jones": "Lying's the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off."

Four months later, Anna obtains her divorce from Larry by agreeing to his one condition, out of pity and guilt. However, her honesty (which she thinks of as kindness) with Dan (who calls it cowardice, preferring prevarication, "the currency of the world," for such exchanges) results in his going to see Larry, who lectures the failed novelist and plagiarist of affections, about his failure in love because of his inability to compromise.

Before Dan, who has become the newspaper's editor of obits, departs, Larry hands him a prescription for Alice's place of employment. But is he lying about carnal knowledge of the stripper? Celebrating their fourth anniversary since her accident, Dan, explaining that without the truth "we're animals," delves into Alice's past with Larry, to which she says: "I don't want to lie, and I can't tell the truth." Honor among thieves, shamelessness among lovers.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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