QUILLS (Fox Searchlight) Starring: Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, Joaquin Phoenix, Michael Caine. Screenplay: Doug Wright, based on his play. Producers: Julia Chasman, Peter Kaufman and Nick Wechsler. Director: Philip Kaufman. MPAA Rating: R (nudity, sexual situations, adult themes, profanity, violence) Running Time: 123 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
As the title character in THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT, Woody Harrelson says at one point (and I paraphrase), "If the First Amendment protects a scumbag like me, then it will protect anybody." That's the approximate thematic gist playwright Doug Wright is going for in QUILLS: an exploration of the idea that even free speech at its most extreme and offensive should still be free. It's a worthy enough idea to espouse, and the movie based on Wright's QUILLS should have been plenty worthy as well -- if only it weren't so damned self-congratulatory about its position. As splendidly staged as Philip Kaufman's cinematic version of QUILLS may be, it's ultimately stunted by a text so concerned with making its artistic points that it flops as simple story-telling.
QUILLS takes us to Paris during the reign of Napoleon, where street vendors are selling scandalous, sexually explicit novels attributed to "Anonymous." Of course, everyone knows they are the work of the Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush), even though he is currently an inmate of Charenton Asylum under the kindly supervision of a priest, the Abbe Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix). He has been smuggling out his work with the help of a laundress named Madeleine (Kate Winslet), arousing the ire of Napoleon himself. The emperor sends Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine), noted alienist, to clean up matters at Charenton. But the not-so-good doctor finds that silencing de Sade will be no easy matter, as the prolific nobleman is practically compelled to spill his obscene thoughts onto paper.
Thus begins an all-around celebration of the purgative powers of porn. The Marquis, we are told, has been so tainted by the world around him that he must spill "the toxins in his head" into his stories; Madeleine, who revels in his naughty work, tells Coulmier, "If I wasn't such a bad woman on the page, I'll hazard I couldn't be such a good woman in life." QUILLS offers a dozen different defenses of free speech at its most unfettered, including commentary that we must know vice in order to appreciate virtue, and a taunt from the Marquis to the Abbe: "Are your convictions so fragile that they cannot stand in opposition to mine?" Every five minutes or so, there's another re-phrasing of the same point in a slightly different way: Art is just art, words are just words, and even the most ghastly art and the most ghastly words must be given their table in the marketplace of ideas.
A debatable point, to be certain, but the problem isn't so much whether or not one concurs with Wright's absolutist interpretation of freedom of speech. The problem with QUILLS is that Wright is so intent on hammering his point home that he ignores little matters like fleshing out his characters. Winslet and Phoenix are effective as the essentially good people aware of their darker impulses, but Wright is mostly interested in them as representations of the dark impulses in all of us. Michael Caine plays one narrow-eyed note as the hypocritical man of morality who, naturally, is sexually cruel to his own young wife (Amelia Warner) and leeches funds from de Sade's wife to help finish his opulent home. And Rush, while thoroughly entertaining as the ultimate libertine, never gets at what de Sade was ultimately all about as a human being. Once you've figured out what Wright is saying in QUILLS -- and it doesn't take all that long -- the playing out of the narrative feels like a long walk around in circles.
Wright does deserve credit for not taking the easiest ways out with his arguments. He shows de Sade's work provoking a group of madmen to violent acts, and he doesn't soft-pedal the cruel, petulant de Sade himself as a torture artist just to make him more sympathetic as a tortured artist. There are several individually enjoyable scenes in QUILLS, from the "telephone game" rendering of one of de Sade's tales to the staging of a bawdy play intended to humiliate Royer-Collard. Physically, it's a lovely production to behold. Emotionally, it is provocative stuff. But intellectually, it's redundant. It's clear that Wright believes even the kind of art that could inspire a Columbine massacre must not be suppressed. It's equally clear that he feels pretty good about himself for saying so. Ironically, QUILLS probably works best as simple, sensual, prurient-interest entertainment. As a presentation of ideas, it's more thesis than theater.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 ink tanks: 6.
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