By Johnny Ray Huston

AFTER HIS EARLY collaborations with Elaine May – ever since his days spent Simon-izing Broadway – Mike Nichols has built a career out of adapting other people's material for big and small screens, acting as an overlord of mainstream culture. If Angels in America's Emmy sweep earlier this year reflected lofty hopes for marriage equality and a different president, then Nichols's film version of Patrick Marber's Closer is in lockstep with postelection, moralistic mean reds. It's punishment time.

The quartet of sinners encased in Closer's dramatic bubble face many more moments of comeuppance than instances of pleasure. Nichols's latest works over the same masochistic impulses targeted by perfume commercials, and at times seems just as superficial. At best – usually when Marber's screenplay cuts through the visual adornments – it motors along like a cold, mechanized update of the director's past fearsome foursomes. Wild personality, the type of swampy temper displayed by an Elizabeth Taylor or Jack Nicholson (or an Anne Bancroft or Ann Margret), isn't part of the equation. Closer's casting seems to toy with the offscreen histories of its two biggest marquee names, but their rangy roles fit a bit too loosely.

In chilly London, journalist and beginning novelist Dan (Jude Law) falls for stripper-turned-barrista Alice (Natalie Portman) before she falls in front of moving traffic. One sequence and a year or two later, Dan and successful portrait photographer Anna Cameron (Julia Roberts) meet not-cute in her studio, alternately flirting with and insulting each other. If Anna didn't also have an other half, Marber's streamlined paradoxes wouldn't play out fully – and a dermatologist named Larry (Clive Owen, stagier yet livelier than the rest) wouldn't get to deliver the big line of deep truth about romantic corruption, lecturing Law's naive writer about the bloody, fistlike qualities of the human heart.

Closer is as sharp or heavy-handed as its source material and as phony as its trimmings (especially Portman's call-girl wig). Nichols winds up with something nearer to actual human behavior than the antics found in overwrought book-to-screen transfers such as Primary Colors and Ironweed. But this meta-exercise doesn't have the same playfulness regarding mise-en-scène found in his underrated Postcards from the Edge. And he's not quite in Edward Albee territory, either. Like Albee's George and Martha, Marber's endlessly parrying characters voice the type of questions and recriminations usually left unspoken. But in comparison, their cutting remarks don't have the same convincing conversational flair.

Everything is a version of something else in Marber's rigidly schematic scenario, and each double-crossing person, largely defined by a job description, also deceives him- or herself. None more so than Law's Dan, who starts out cocky enough to channel Marilyn Chambers behind the green door of a chat room, in order to trick Larry into thinking he's Anna, a blond with "epic tits." (Nichols scores the action to the strains of the favored Karajan-conducted recording of Mozart's Così fan tutte.) Just last year Law was treated to a greater number of loving close-ups than Nicole Kidman in Cold Mountain, but here – amid the exposure that comes with a half-dozen starring roles – his attractiveness is overtly denigrated. If box office is any indication, he didn't make Alfie's sad song better, and his Dan is another callow scoundrel (in the vein of The Talented Mr. Ripley's Dickie Greenleaf) who becomes man bait.

Typecasting can be a trap, but it's better than miscasting – Portman's squeaky-clean little Lulu routine is proof. Portman makes for a posh working girl, and the disconnect between her immaculate appearance and Alice's relatively sketchy hard-knock existence exposes the conservative streak beneath Closer's own tease routine. Of Marber's quartet, Alice is the closest to a cypher: the dialogue rarely allows her to move beyond being pigeonholed as a stripper (therefore debased), and her relatively limited screen time only furthers that dismissal. Similarly, Dan's homoerotic flirtation with Larry gradually transforms into a he-man-versus-loverboy contest, with the gruff and tough guy emerging victorious.

That leaves Roberts, aloof as ever, to move along the periphery of the action while playing the role of main attraction. It's hard to see why her photographer inspires such hot-blooded responses from Marber's dominant men. A gallery opening featuring Anna's portraits brings the movie's central quartet together under one roof and allows three of them the opportunity to mock the Irving Penn knockoffs on display. But is Closer really that much deeper than Anna's snapshots? Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'s and Carnal Knowledge's iconic performers wrestled with the sexual conflicts of their eras, but this movie often feels even colder and more calculating than the characters it contains.

'Closer' opens Fri/3 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock for show times.