C+

“Everything is a version of something else,” one of the four bed-hopping characters that populate Mike Nichols’ film version of Patrick Marber’s play says about midway through “Closer.” It’s a clever line, characteristic of the sort of wit of which Marber is capable (though much of his dialogue goes for the shock value of obscenity). But it’s also an apt commentary on the picture itself, because “Closer,” with its quartet of participants and its emphasis on how men and women use one another as sexual objects, seems uncomfortably like a combination of two of its director’s previous films, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Carnal Knowledge.” And in the final analysis it comes across not only as used goods as far as Nichols’ earlier work is concerned, but also by comparison to more recent treatments of male-female warfare like the plays and pictures of Neil LaBute. In fact, “Closer” often seems like LaBute Lite–not nearly as sharp or stinging in terms of plot, and much more likely to fall back on repetition of the “F” word to generate a reaction–the last refuge of a writer whose imagination has dried up.

The plot is simple in substance but complex in construction. Dan (Jude Law), a writer of obituaries and would-be novelist, meets up with Alice (Natalie Portman), a young, casually seductive American girl just arrived in London, and after a few hours conversation has decided to dump his current girlfriend–whom we never see–and take up with her. Time passes, and Dan is having a dust-jacket photo for his first book–based on Alice’s life–taken by Anna (Julia Roberts), a divorcee whom he’s immediately attracted to; Alice quickly senses the fizz between them. Then Dan, pretending to be Anna in an internet chat room, induces a dermatologist named Larry (Clive Owen) to meet “her” the following day for a sexual encounter, but the two hit it off and eventually marry. When Dan encounters Anna again, however, they begin an affair which leads her to divorce Larry; simultaneously Alice leaves Dan, resuming her former line of work in a strip club where she’s propositioned by none other than the now-distraught Larry. But Larry’s not finished: by inducing Anna into a compromising admission, he sabotages her relationship with Dan; and ultimately the quartet winds up in a reconfiguration still rife–as is revealed in a twist ending–with uncertainties and deceptions.

Marber and Nichols manage to keep all this clear, despite the sudden chronological shifts and abrupt transitions, but they don’t succeed in making it plausible or profound. The characters never emerge as genuine people of any nuance or shading; they’re nothing but pure libido–the sort of sketch figures that one can easily accept in the artificial atmosphere of the theatre, where the arbitrary movement of such empty pieces around a sexual chess board might seem an acceptable contrivance, but who seem vacuous and phony in the more naturalistic setting of a film. (Maybe it would help if, like “Woolf,” it had been shot in black-and-white.) There’s not much depth to the performances of the actors who inhabit the roles, either. Owen manages to overcome the lack with sheer dramatic ferocity and rattles off his angry dialogue with spitfire precision, and Law–who seems to be appearing in a new film every five minutes or so (perhaps playing Alfie has infected him with the Michael Caine penchant for saying yes to anything)–gets by on his easygoing good looks and his mixture of charm and vulnerability. But the women are less successful. Portman is physically a knockout, but her coquettish Alice seems an entirely surface phenomenon, and the character’s glibness seems more theatrical than real; Roberts, on the other hand, appears to be utterly at a loss as the indecisive Anna, who becomes the missing link of the quartet in the final act. Nichols and cinematographer Stephen Goldblatt give the film a stylish look, but that can’t conceal the emotional emptiness.

The superficiality of “Closer” is, finally, accentuated by the choice of music. We repeatedly hear snatches of “Cosi fan tutte” as commentary to the coupling and uncoupling on the screen–not inappropriate in itself, since the opera’s plot in many respects mirrors Marber’s. But the comparison is unfavorable to the movie, because as usual, Mozart does it so much better.