By Cynthia W. Gentry, © 2000 by Cynthia W. Gentry, published on Dailygossip.com, December 2000.
There is only one word to describe the state of mind in which I and my dear friend, the ever-winsome-and-artistic DawnI, found ourselves after seeing “Quills,” Philip Kaufman’s portrayal of the notorious Marquis de Sade. That word is “agog.” My Webster’s defines the term as “full of intense interest or excitement,” and I don’t think there’s any better adjective for this movie. It’s a brilliant tour de force from beginning to end.
Yes, I know “Quills,” has received mixed reviews from many critics. Heaven forbid I come across as opinionated, but well, they’re just plain wrong. For example, many reviewers, including my beloved Anthony Lane of The New Yorker, fault “Quills” for its historical inaccuracy. And? Did I miss the word “documentary” over the opening credits? Excuse me. I must have been trying to restart my heartbeat after the audacious scene that begins the movie and makes the connection between lust and terror, in more ways the one.
“Quills” is also more than simply the ode to freedom of speech that some critics have described it, comparing it to films such as “The People Vs. Larry Flynt.” It’s also about more than sex, despite what the trailers would have you believe. Based on the play by Doug Wright (who also wrote the screenplay), “Quills” takes on issues of hypocrisy, repression and freedom of artistic expression, themes Kaufman also explored in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”
The Marquis de Sade advocated a kind of sexual anarchy—“True happiness lies in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them,” he once said—and that was, and is, as threatening as political anarchy to the powers that be. (His writings were banned in France until very recently.) Exposed from an early age to depravity, the Marquis was no Boy Scout: he practiced what he preached, and was thrown in jail several time for sexually abusing both women and children. Not a swell guy, the Marquis. “Quills” confines itself to the end of the Marquis’ life, when he was imprisoned in the insane asylum in Charenton for his refusal to stop writing novels like Justine and Juliette.
As portrayed by Geoffrey Rush, who’s my pick for the Best-Actor Oscar, the Marquis is brilliant, charming, profane and scandalous—just the type of guy you’d like to have at a dinner party, particularly one attended by members of the so-called Christian Right. Some have called Rush’s performance “over the top.” Well, yes. What of it? If ever a part cried for an actor to push his limits, this is it. And Rush, literally, bares it all.
Despite his imprisonment, the Marquis continues to write under the supposed guidance of the compassionate Abbé Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix, in yet another stunning performance), who believes that writing about vice will decrease the Marquis’ need to act on it. What the Abbé doesn’t know is that the Marquis is smuggling his novels—which appear to be as widely awaited as the next Harry Potter tome and much more interesting, in my rather salacious opinion—out of prison with the help of the literature-loving chambermaid Madeline (the bodacious Kate Winslet, who looks as if she had just sprung from an X-rated Fragonard).
Since sex is always much more threatening than violence, the Marquis’ writings are blamed for inspiring a variety of crimes. This comes to the attention of Napoleon, who sends Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) to “cure” the Marquis. Slowly but surely, de Sade is deprived of his means of artistic expression, a punishment that is for him worse than death.
I’m sure that Kaufman meant us to draw a parallel with our own society. Today, of course, we have the MPAA rating system to institute hypocrisy into American cinema. Kaufman’s literary lovefest “Henry & June” thus gets a kiss-of-death NC-17 and Stanley Kubrick has to digitally alter his orgies, while the bloodbaths of Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers” garner an R.
As we all know by now, the term “sadism” has come to mean “one who receives sexual satisfaction from the infliction of pain on others.” Ironically, it is not the Marquis who is the sadist in “Quills,” but the amoral and hypocritical Dr. Royer-Collard, whose psychological “cures” most closely resemble the tortures of the Inquisition and whose sexual interests run to young girls.
Though he’ll no doubt receive an Oscar nomination, I found Caine’s performance rather one-note, with none of the nuance an Alan Rickman or Jeremy Irons might have brought to the role. (To me, Joaquin Phoenix’s tormented emperor in “Gladiator” was the most interesting part of the movie.) Caine’s Royer-Collard is simply a monster rather than a three-dimensional human being. However, both Winslet and Phoenix rise to the occasion. In particular, I continue to be amazed by Phoenix. His Abbé does do some terrible things, but without losing our sympathy.
That’s not to say that there aren’t any missteps in “Quills.” Madeline, who longs after the Abbé in mutual chaste adoration, also engages in some flirtation with the courier who picks up the Marquis’ latest chapters; this courier, with his black clothes and horse, appears to have sprung directly from the pages of the latest bodice-ripper. It’s also sometimes hard to forget that “Quills” was once a play: the dialogue, though superb, gets a little talky at points, especially in the scenes between Rush and Phoenix. But otherwise, Kaufman does a superb job in extending the action beyond the claustrophobic prison cell where the Marquis rages.
“Quills” does encourage often-blocked writers like myself to participate in a sort of literary masochism. As I watched the Marquis do anything he could to express himself—even use various bodily fluids as ink—I kicked myself internally over and over. That man is in a prison cell writing in his own blood, I thought, while I can’t even get myself to sit down at my expensive little laptop in my Pottery Barn apartment. But there are times, too, when I have felt compelled to write. If “Quills” is an ode to anything, it’s an ode to the artistic urge, an urge that like sexuality, isn’t always pretty, and isn’t always safe.
I can’t write about “Quills” without writing about the strain of political commentary that runs through it. The French Revolution may have been a reaction against the excesses of the nobility, but by the time Napoleon crowns himself emperor, the revolutionaries are committing the same excesses. Royer-Collard buys a villa in which the bloodstains of the previous owner’s wife, who was killed by the Jacobins, paint the staircase. Yet he lets his young wife spare no expense in renovating it.
Are all revolutions fueled by nothing but envy? It’s a weak comparison, but I can’t help thinking about our own times, in which dot-com millionaires pat themselves on the back for creating a “New Economy” while they fall over themselves to buy themselves the accoutrements of the old one: gas-guzzling, smog-creating SUVs and monster mansions that would put Louis XIV to shame. Meanwhile rents force lower- and middle-income people—you know, those folks who make the lattes and clean our offices—out of their homes.
With the recent debacle of an election, many pundits have applauded the fact that despite the zaniness, there were no armies in the streets, no riots. I think it’s great, too, but I think we should thank our own apathy, not our system of law, because if people really understood what had happened, I’d doubt we’d be so sanguine. A second round of Republican “trickle-down theory” may take care of everything, or the natural permutations of the stock market might even restore balance. But sometimes I wonder whether people will know there’s a revolution until it comes into their own gated communities. As “Quills” shows in such graphic detail, eventually all excesses get checked, but often in direct proportion to their extremes.