The plot is weighty and powerfully emotional, but Nichols treads lightly. He shows us only what is necessary to carry us through the strange entanglements of four lives over the space of a few years. I appreciated his selectivity, his judgment, his silence. But I didn't know what it all meant.

What, after all, is the meaning of that title? Closer. Closer to what?

So I watched it a second time, and had a few thoughts.

Perhaps this is a film about sex. There is plenty of sex in this film. The four characters pair off in every possible heterosexual way, looking, presumably, for love. Larry is addicted to sex; Alice is a stripper; Anna and Larry meet because of a sexual encounter over the internet. We cringe as Anna shouts the sexually explicit details of her affair at the top of her lungs. Then "I'm disgusting," she admits, because sex is betrayal.

But Larry has been unfaithful, too, and to that he willingly confesses. When asked why he bothered making the confession, Larry's answer is frank: "I couldn't lie to you.... Because I love you."

Well then, perhaps this is a film about love. Alice and Dan fall in love right away. And love, for Alice, means commitment. She tells him that the only way to leave anyone is to say, "I don't love you anymore." Says Dan, "You've never left anyone you still love?" Her answer: "Nope."

Dan loves Alice too, but, unfortunately for her, he also loves Anna. He comes clean on this, and Alice's compelling understanding of the how's and why's of love belies her few years: "Oh, as if you had no choice? There's a moment. There's always a moment. I can do this. I can give in to this or I can resist it. And I don't know when your moment was but—I bet you there was one."

Is she right? Is there a moment when you can choose to love, when you can step aside and reject it or free-fall willingly in? If we are honest with ourselves, I think we might agree with her.

So perhaps this is a film about honesty. Larry begs for it, pleads. He'd rather know the explicit details of Anna's affair, just to know the truth. And when, at a strip club filled with all the sexual potential his addiction craves, he can't get the truth from a stripper, he cries out in agony, "What do you have to do to get a bit of intimacy around here?"

Sex is not intimacy; love is not honest. The dialogue, the plot, even the cinematography dance around what is true and whether or not we want it. "What's so great about the truth?" Dan asks. "You should try lying for a change. It's the currency of the world." It may very well be. Alice seems to think so. "The art is a lie," she tells Larry at an art exhibit. "A bunch of sad strangers photographed beautifully. All the glittering assholes who appreciate art say it's beautiful because that's what they want to see. But the people in the photos are sad and alone. But the pictures make the world seem beautiful so the exhibition is reassuring which makes it a lie—and everyone loves a big, fat lie."

This film photographs the actors beautifully, and they portray strangers--people who, in the end, are strangers even to the ones who love them, who slept with them, who think they know them. These strangers are sad indeed, and Nichols shows that, above all, these strangers are very much alone.

And so he manages to make a film that is, above all, about honesty; a film that shows us what happens when we are not true to ourselves and don't choose to be true to another, or mistake sex for the truth. Yes, it is about honesty or, at the very least, something closer to honesty than I've seen in a long time.