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De Sade, the pleasure is ours
By Mike Clark
Gannett News Service
(December 22, 2000) -- No one can accuse the Marquis de Sade of writer's block in Philip Kaufman's admirably fluid Quills, an adaptation of Doug Wright's Obie-winning play that triumphs over potentially claustrophobic material. As a matter of fact, several scenes even deal with fluids -- unconventional ones that the scandalous Marquis ultimately employs as ink substitutes after authorities confiscate quills and other writing instruments in France's Charenton asylum for the insane.
The incarcerated Marquis (Geoffrey Rush) hungers to write, and the most humane of his early 19th-century oppressors (Joaquin Phoenix as asylum supervisor Abbi de Coulmier) has allowed the titillating writer to do so. Though the progressive Abbi's intentions are purely therapeutic, one of the facility's chambermaids (Kate Winslet) has been smuggling out the Marquis' sexually explicit pennings to a publisher, who has been printing them under the name "Anonymous." It's a ruse that fools no one. Everyone in official France, from Napoleon on down, is apoplectic, though the general populace is having a grand old time.
What follows is a game of puritanical cats (plural) and mischievous mouse (with helpers with helpers) in -- a contest of wills that grows more deliriously deviant as it races toward a mad climactic encounter that, let's just say, among many other things, makes a strong case for closed caskets. Undeniably aimed at specialized tastes and perhaps too schematic for even its target audience, the movie nonetheless mounts a pertinent attack on the frequent hypocrisy of those who would stifle free speech.
And in this regard, it has a fun-to-hate villain who you just know, from the moment you see him amid courtship, will soon be playing the cuckold. He would be Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine), an expert in torture devices who arrives to put a stop to the Sade Marquis' chicanery and to revamp a nearby mansion for his child bride (Amanda Warner as the hottest innocent in the convent).
Once she starts reading the Marquis de Sade's outlawed Justine on the sly, her eyes start roaming off the page, and Royer-Collard starts putting more zeal into his doled-out punishments. Give the doctor some credit: Not just anyone can make a relative hero out of the Marquis, whom Rush seems to savor making as seedy as possible.
As a choice of material, the movie adds to the unpredictable mix that is Kaufman's career: Henry & June, The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and 1978's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Uniformly robust acting puts still more (quill) feathers in the caps of Rush, Winslet and Caine, just as the last is coming off an Academy Award win for playing another unconventional doctor in The Cider House Rules. Oscars are one thing, but don't look for Caine's latest one-two acting punch to win him AMA certification. Rated R, with strong sexual content including dialogue, violence and language.