In directing “Closer”, Mike Nichols must have had tremendous faith that his audience would find something interesting in watching four people repeatedly gauge away at each other with emotional daggers. The quartet of Jude Law, Clive Owen, Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts belongs in some reality television show which tosses beautiful people into a gladator’s pit to watch them battle it out. The pulchritude of its stars makes the movie seem all the emptier; Nichols has made a study in pretty, mid-Atlantic vacancy.

“Closer” features men and women who are not too rich and not too poor, bohemian enough to run an art photography studio but white collar enough to have a private medical practice. Clive Owen’s Larry, for instance, bears an unmistakably working-class sneer, yet his is a world of dinner parties and gallery openings. Natalie Portman’s Alice, an antiseptic, doll-faced stripper, could just as easily be studying Emily Dickinson at Harvard (Portman is, in fact, at Harvard). Because of this sameness, there’s an ambivalence to all the scenes that flattens the fizzle in the dialogue. The zingers zing, but what exactly is at stake?

Apparently nothing. Happiness, sex, social status, and money play no roles in this film. Even in Woody Allen’s films the plots are tied to the heart’s anarchic logic—“the heart wants what it wants”, as Allen himself said many years back. Here there is nothing but meanness and petty sniping. Only Clive Owen’s chilling and uncanny knack for delivering the lowest of low blows makes his character seem alive. He, at least, derives sadistic pleasure in manipulating the others.

When Dan confronts Larry about his cuckolding, “Closer” gives us one of the best scenes in any movie this year, as Owen drags Law face-first through his own mewling spinelessness. No punches are thrown, but it’s a bracingly violent scene. Owen delivers the coup de grace line with “You...writer”, and watching Law shrivel under his attack is as squirm-worthy as anything Neil LaBute has ever done. If only Nichols had made us feel that “Closer” was something more than a pointless merry-go-round of spite.