Closer is a film in which a struggling novelist/obituary writer and a dermatologist joust over the affections of a fine-art photographer and a stripper. Watching it is like meeting a Woody Allen movie at a party, chatting it up, and realizing during the conversation that its breath smells vaguely of poo. That’s because it’s a love story that’s about falling out of love. It’s an anti-romance. That discolored stuff seeping through the walls of each carefully designed interior? It ain’t love, L-U-V. It's something curdled and poisonous.

When the stage version of Closer debuted on London’s West End in 1997, Neil LaBute was just garnering attention with the filmed version of his own 1992 play, In the Company of Men, which asked the question, “Just how shitty can people be to each other?” At the time, Closer might have seemed like a slightly more generous positing of the same query. It’s a work that suggests that, when it comes to love, people can act in a sort of misguided self-interest that has the effect of putting a stake through the heart of love rather than closing the distance between themselves and the people they believe they desperately want to be intimate with. It’s about hearts that only think they know what they want, and it wonders aloud whether the truth, between lovers, is overrated.

In the years between Closer’s stage debut and its film adaptation, we’ve seen this kind of you-screwed-me-so-I-screwed-you banter played for varying degrees of comedy and tragedy — enough to make Closer itself feel redundant in context. (Replace the whiny Damien Rice track that bookends the film with “Bittersweet Symphony” and you’d give Closer some of the devilish glossiness of Cruel Intentions. Replace it with Leonard Cohen and you’d invest it with some of the sad grandeur of Exotica.) Aside from it being an excuse to run some very good-looking people through their paces on cinema screens (Natalie Portman in a thong!), I can’t see any particularly good reasons to film it — at least not as it’s been re-staged by director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Patrick Marber, adapting his own play.

Here’s the rundown: Natalie Portman is stripper Alice, an American living in London. Alice meets obit writer Dan (Jude Law). Dan and Alice meet photographer Anna (Julia Roberts) as subjects of a project of hers in which she photographs strangers looking sad. And Anna meets doctor Larry (Clive Owen) after he falls victim to Dan’s smug, Internet-enabled practical jokes. En route to the film’s conclusion, marriages ensue, followed by affairs. People treat each other badly. Matters of the heart are dictated by selfishness and sex, while never actually depicted on screen, opens the door to sheer deviousness.

Given its unpleasant view of human relations, Closer could be described as a popcorn movie for sociopaths, although Marber is one of those guys who wants to anticipate his audience’s critique before the audience has a chance to form it. He puts it in the mouth of Alice, criticizing Anna’s gallery show as beautiful photography of unhappy people — dishonest as art because it fails to engage with or even acknowledge the reality that it exploits. (“Look here,” Marber seems to be saying, “I’m so damned empathetic that I recognize the fundamental sadness of not only my emotionally damaged characters, but also the emotionally damaged people I expect to make up my audience. And — and! — I recognize the fundamental inability of art to mitigate real pain on top of that.”)

OK, this stuff is not wholly uninteresting, even to the undamaged viewer. Marber seems genuinely concerned about the ways that people in love take advantage of one another, with the needier person in a relationship in danger of getting the worst of it, and about the pros and cons of openness. Some of Closer is quite funny in a black way, including an online-sex-chat centerpiece and a series of desperate male reactions to the matter-of-factness of women in conversation about fidelity and the lack thereof. The narrative strategy is clever, eliding the everyday happiness and pleasure of relationships — audience members have to fill in those gaps themselves — and dwelling instead on those unpleasant conversations during which everything goes wrong. And there’s the thing — Closer doesn’t relent, and its relentlessness feels contrived.

Closer is certainly a story of unhappy people, but Nichols has cast resolutely A-list glamour in its miserable roles. Of the three names above the title, Julia Roberts fares the best and Natalie Portman the worst. Because I found Roberts mostly insufferable as a youngster, I’m heartened to see her mature into a fine grown-up actor. Her character is passive, more of a receptacle for assertions of love than an actual lover, and Roberts’s performance is perched somewhere on the warm side of a cipher. Jude Law is just OK. In his first few scenes, he seems way too urbane to be that struggling entry-level journalist, the one who becomes an obit writer because he can’t get that novel out. Later, he seems way too urbane to be that needy, mewling whelp sobbing over his serial misfortune in love. The demure, hesitant Portman, meanwhile, struggles self-consciously from scene to scene as she tries vainly to inhabit a character written as forthright and mercurial. Especially in a crucial scene played out with Clive Owen in the private room of an upscale strip club, Portman seems ill at ease, lacking the requisite sexual confidence breasts out or not, she doesn’t have the stomach for the role. Though he’s less uniformly gorgeous than his castmates, Owen is absolutely terrific, nailing self-centered and tacky with an insistent boorishness verging on pomposity.

Nichols's direction is long on body language — here’s a man who’s spent a lot of time observing the ways real people interact with one another — but he’s unable to engage with this stuff on a cinematic level. The script’s origins on the stage are betrayed by the film’s tendency toward mannered, sharply pointed snippets of dialogue. The writer remains the auteur, and once you figure out the game he’s playing, there’s little satisfaction in watching it all happen; he sinks these folks so far in the muck that it would take all the love in London and then some just to extricate them. If it’s not pure sadism, it’s an exercise in despair — a story told in a state of morose omnipotence by an unhappy God gazing on His imperfect creations.