The directorial debut of Chris Terrio offers a small-world view of New York, where everyone is separated not by the proverbial six degrees but by more like two. A male ex-lover of a bisexual photographer called Benjamin Stone ("Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Benjamin Stone -- the Holy Trinity") has arrived from London to research a Vanity Fair piece on the photographer's ex-lovers; one of these is the closeted fiancé of a neophyte photographer who happens to be the daughter of another of those rumored exes, a Broadway diva; the diva, currently teaching and rehearsing Macbeth, is also auditioning and flirting with an aspiring young actor who lives in the same building as the daughter and who (this would spoil the surprise if it actually came as a surprise) is having a clandestine affair with the fiancé. Were the tight weave not sufficiently suffocating already, the film retains the sound, if not the space limitations, of the stage. (Amy Fox, in collaboration with Terrio, adapted her own play.) It is perhaps fitting, then, that the ensemble cast should be dominated by the prima-donna persona of Glenn Close, a character so consumed by acting that no emotion, however honest, can escape her art. (You can't tell where the fictional actress leaves off and the real one takes over. Or to say it another way, you can't tell where the real one overacts.) Then, too, a cast of Elizabeth Banks, James Marsden, Jesse Bradford, John Light, et al., is easily dominated. George Segal, safely out of range of Close, has a funny bit as a rabbi doing his duty in the line of premarital counseling. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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