"I Love Everything About You That Hurts."

Mark Harris, Author of Mike Nichols: A Life, answers all my questions about Closer.

You’re reading Hung Up, the newsletter from Hunter Harris. This is The Tuesday Post, a weekly essay or interview or deep dive. If you like this kind of thing, you can subscribe here.

Jude Law giving Robert De Niro in The Irishman eyes, but we won’t hold it against him.

Here is what happens in Closer: The forlorn photographer Anna (Julia Roberts) is dating Larry (Clive Owen), but sometimes she kisses Dan (Jude Law), and other times she just lets him hover at the edge of her periphery. The younger, puckish Alice (Natalie Portman) is Dan’s girlfriend, but she lets Larry’s hands stroke her cheek a little too intimately. “It's a bunch of sad strangers photographed beautifully,” Alice tells Larry, as they’re observing portraits at Anna’s gallery show. “And all the glittering assholes who appreciate art say it's beautiful 'cause that's what they wanna see. But the people in the photos are sad, and alone.” It applies as much to Anna’s moody black and white images as it does the movie and their …