Breathtakingly cruel and quietly devastating, Mike Nichols' adaptation of Patrick Marber's acclaimed play peers beneath the sheets as two couples wrestle with their own self-destructive impulses and wound each other in the name of love — sometimes accidentally, more often with due deliberation and malice aforethought. Newly arrived in London from New York, punky, fresh-faced stripper and self-described waif Alice (Natalie Portman) is hit by a car; aspiring novelist Dan (Jude Law), who's languishing in the doldrums of writing newspaper obituaries, comes to her aid. A year later Dan has written his first book, which draws extensively on Alice's experiences, and impulsively kisses soon-to-be divorced American photographer Anna (Julia Roberts) while having his book-jacket photo taken. Anna rebuffs Dan after establishing that he's living with Alice, but the damage is done: The possibility of an affair has been kindled and an overheard snippet of conversation plants the seeds of doubt in Alice's mind. Some months later, Dan's novel is faltering and, in a fit of bored, late-night naughtiness, he logs onto an online chat room and pretends to be a lusty blond named "Anna." Frustrated dermatologist Larry (Clive Owen, the only holdover from the original London cast; he originated the role of Dan) takes the bait and Dan sets up a rendezvous at the London Aquarium, where the real Anna often goes to relax. Larry and Anna wind up together, and the couples cross paths at Anna's first show four months after that, setting in motion a series of guilty flirtations, impulsive encounters and deceptively casual betrayals that flay the layers of posturing, self-deception, fantasy and emotional scar tissue from their bones. More than 30 years after directing Jules Feiffer's excoriating CARNAL KNOWLEDGE (1971), the 73-year-old Nichols returned to the front and found the details of the war between the sexes different and the bitter dynamics exactly the same. When the laws of attraction kick in, the rules of engagement are thrown out, and all's fair in sex and suspicion. Overall, Owen and Law are more nuanced than Roberts and Portman, but Portman's dewy youth is 90 percent of Alice (the remaining 10 is an eleventh-hour twist), and Nichols uses the unkindly costumed Roberts so skillfully that her performance looks like a revelation. All four handle Marber's brittle, acid-edged dialogue — whose subtle stylization is trickier than it seems — with aplomb and, far from undermining the ugliness of what they say, their combined beauty just makes it seem worse. --Maitland McDonagh
