PARTNERS.(Movie Review)

The new Mike Nichols film, "Closer," starts with a man falling in love with Natalie Portman. From this we may assume that the movie is concerned with universal, a-priori truths, although there is a scene in a lap-dancing club when the a-posteriori version comes in handy. The man is Dan (Jude Law), a writer of obituaries for a London newspaper, who wears a hangdog suit as if in half-mourning for his subjects. Portman plays a slip of a thing named Alice, a stripper by profession, just in from New York. If she knew how much soul, as opposed to body, she would be forced to bare in the course of her stay, she might have turned around and flown home.

The next thing we ...