Marquis de Sade: Geoffrey Rush
Madeleine: Kate Winslet
Coulmier: Joaquin Phoenix
Royer-Collard: Michael Caine
10 April 2003
by Jasmine Park
There are few things more tiresome in contemporary cinema than a film based on a play that still feels like a play. The wooden dialogue, the clever banter, the pauses for the audience to laugh and recover, the sparse sets, the small casts - it is all just so damn old-fashioned. Contemporary cinema has progressed at a rate so far ahead of contemporary theater, and films almost always only suffer by adapting them. Add to that a film that is adapted from a mediocre play, and you've got a real gem on your hands. Peter Greenaway might have been able to make a decent film about the Marquis de Sade; instead, we have Philip Kaufman's Quills (2000), based on the play by Doug Wright, which commits a true offense to its subject - it's a movie about the Marquis de Sade that is, of all things, tasteful.
The film is a fictionalized account of Sade's last days in Charenton, an asylum run by the young Abbe Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix). The other residents of the asylum are your typical hodge-podge assortment of endearingly wacko characters, while Coulmier is a sweet, gentle-natured master who exchanges pseudo-clever banter with the Marquis and encourages him to put his sordid thoughts down on paper as self-help. But the Abbe is unaware that Sade has also befriended the buxom laundrette Madeleine (Kate Winslet), with whom the Abbe is secretly in love. Madeleine, smitten by Sade's twisted tales, smuggles his writings out of the asylum to be printed and sold. Word of Sade's writings makes it to Napoleon's court; thus, the emperor's eye comes to rest on Charenton, and he sends the doctor Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) to work his "extreme-rehab" magic on the Marquis. Of course, Sade resists despite the Abbe's pleadings for him to behave for the doctor, and Sade and Royer-Collard engage in a tit-for-tat spiral of torment that ends with Sade, naked and gagged, in a pit where he has written his final story in his own shit on the walls. I admit to being mildly impressed by this scene when Sade, offered a cross by the Abbe to kiss for his last rites, commits suicide by suddenly biting it off and swallowing it. But sadly, this is the only moment in the entire film that approaches being genuinely sadistic.
Quills is filled with bad one-liners that are meant to convey Sade's uniquely insidious nature - the type of dialogue that is meant to make a theater audience titter with delight ("How clever! He's so funny!"), but only comes off sounding like bad sitcom writing. When the Abbe angrily presents Sade with a copy of his black-market writing, Sade only clucks in disapproval: "Look at this cheap paper and small print!" And the one-dimensional characterization of Royer-Collard doesn't even warrant Sade's satiric regard.
Phoenix and Winslet make the best of their lots, but Winslet's Madeleine is not much better developed than Royer-Collard. Eventually martyred as an innocent virgin for the storyline, her sexual naivete is never quite believable; given how gleefully she reads Sade's manuscripts, why would a poor maid working in a mental asylum still be a virgin? And the subplot involving Royer-Collard's scandalously young wife, Simone (Amelie Warner), is just a joke, especially because of the embarrassingly amateurish performance turned in by Warner, who, at one point, gives the least convincing imitation of fellatio ever filmed.
Rush struts and swaggers histrionically throughout the film, but given the dialogue he's stuck with, it's no surprise he is never convincing. He is more fun than, say, John Malkovich would have been with the role, but at least Malkovich's one-trick sneer might have ultimately done Sade more justice. Instead, Quills waters down Sade for popular consumption to beyond the point of recognition. Both Kaufman and Rush have, in the past, shown a propensity for adapting geniuses to suburban tastes. Kaufman's Henry and June (1990) couldn't have made Henry Miller and Anais Nin look more ridiculous; and whether Rush is playing Trotsky, Sir Francis Walsingham, or David Helfgott, he's always sure to earn soccer-mom adoration. But there is something insidious about adapting history in so careless a manner for the screen, reducing people who deserve to give the layman pause to becoming buzzwords of pop culture - "That poor Frida Kahlo! That crazy Jackson Pollock! That funny kook the Marquis de Sade!" While Quills provides a sufficient amount of cheap entertainment, it doesn't approach being art of any kind, particularly in its complete disregard for portraying it honestly.
Fox Searchlight Pictures presents a film directed by Philip Kaufman. Written by Doug Wright, based on his play. Running time: 123 minutes. Rated R (for strong sexual content including dialogue, violence and language).
Geoffrey Rush and Kate Winslet in Quills.
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