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The ink runs a little thin in Geoffrey Rush's QUILLS
SPOILER ALERT !!
Father Geek received the following review of the new Marquis de Sade flick this morning and it doesn't appear to have washed with Moll, the lass who sent it in...
Be forewarned this is SPOILER rich stuff...
QUILLS
Geoffrey Rush ... Marquis de Sade
Kate Winslet ... Madeleine Le Clerc
Joaquin Phoenix ... Abbe de Coulmier
Michael Caine ... Doctor Royer-Collard
This review is based on the assumption that you are vaguely familiar with the perverse, sadistic, erotic, violent writings of the Marquis de Sade, or are at least aware of his reputation of ill-repute.
The movie opens with an upper-body shot of a young maiden seemingly in a state of sexual abandonment ... until the hands of an executioner clasp her neck, forcing it down onto the cutting block of the guillotine -- sounds dramatic and could have worked but didn't, instead a ripple of giggling eminated from the movie audience ... not a good start.
Kate Winslet plays MADELEINE, a laundry woman working in the insane asylum in which the Marquis de Sade (Rush) is interred (her mother also works there). The Marquis has struck a deal with Napolean's advisors (who are aware that his execution would drastically increase the sales of his books), that rather than being put to death he must live out his days in an insane asylum, albeit furnished with all the comforts to which he is accustomed.
Phoenix plays the priest in charge of the asylum, whose methods are to rehabilitate the insane through art, music, theater, etc. He allows the Marquis to write as much as he wants in order to 'purge himself of his impurities' in an effort to save his soul.
Secretly however, Madeleine is smuggling the Marquis' writings out in the dirty laundry linens, and the Marquis is thus able to publish his novel, 'Juliette.' This infuriates Napolean and he appoints a doctor (Caine) to oversee the priests work. The doctor's methods of curing mental instability are somewhat more torturous than the priests, to say the least.
Thus the confusing muddle of antagonistic relationships ensue: between the doctor and the Marquis, the priest and the Marquis, the Doctor and the Priest, the Priest and Madeleine, etc, etc.
The Marquis is in charge of staging a play that the inmates perform before a public audience -- he uses this opportunity to ridicule the doctor and his new, very young, virginal bride (played by a young woman who could not act her way out of a paper bag). The doctor's wife eventually leaves him to pursue her lustful relationship with a younger man, having been sexually liberated after reading the Marquis' book.
As the Marquis finds ways to anger the doctor, the priest is forced to punish him further: he takes away his writing implements so the Marquis writes on his bedclothes using red wine and a chicken drumstick; the priest then empties the Marquis' cell of all its luxuries, so the Marquis cuts himself with shards of glass and uses his own blood to write all over his clothing; the priest then forces him to strip naked in one of the few great scenes of the movie and ultimately, the Marquis uses his own faeces to write on the wall of his dungeon cell.
Meanwhile ... Madeleine has fallen in love with the priest, whose sacred vows of chastity prevent him from consummating the relationship. Their feelings for one another are not always clear, and there is the most ridiculous scene where Madeleine is being whipped (a punishment ordered by the doctor for smuggling the Maquis' writings to his publisher), and so the priest tears off his robes and offers to be whipped in her place (yawn) (more giggles) Madeleine and the priest's relationship is sometimes reminiscent of the super-cheese eighties miniseries THE THORNBIRDS with Richard Chamberlein as the self-sacrificing messenger of god.
To the crunch:
In the final hoo-ha, the Marquis hatches a plan whereby the final story he is to tell Madeleine will be relayed from his cell to the laundry room (where she sits waiting to transcribe it), via the inmates of the other cells.
Each lunatic has a hole in the wall of their cell through which a sadistic tale is told from madman to madman, like a game of "chinese whispers".
Alas, all goes awry when one of them, a pyromaniac, gets hold of his neighbour's candle and proceeds to set the place on fire. Chaos ensues, enabling another crazy (who is obsessed with Madeleine), to crash through into the laundry room, cut out her tongue, and stab her to death. His actions mirror the story that the Marquis has just told them.
The priest is devastated, and from this sad state of affairs comes the best scene of the film: the priest has a necrophiliac dream in which Madeleine and he are making love on the altar of a Catholic church, while the image of Christ crucified looks on. Very cool.
The ending is one of 'false horizons,' the kind where just when you think it's all over ... it's not! and it's long and boring and frustrating. Goes something like this:
The priest and the Marquis de Sade have a showdown in which the priest forces the marquis to admit that he was actually in love with Madeleine; The priest cuts off the Marquis' tongue to revenge Madeleine's death; as the Marquis is dying, the priest attempts to read him his last rights and holds a crucifix up for the Marquis to kiss -- the Marquis ends up swallowing it.
Cut to:
The doctor is showing a priest around the asylum -- this is to be the new priest in charge. They go to the Marquis' old cell and therein lies the priest, dirty and bedraggled, pushed over the edge by the Marquis' final rejection of salvation. He is begging for quills, something to write with, anything. The doctor and the new priest slowly walk away.
The laundry trap opens and it is Madeleine's mother, passing him paper and quills. But rather than write a letter to the world in an attempt to regain his own liberty, the priest begins to write sexual/sadistic/violent material in the manner of the Marquis de Sade.
The acting of the lead players was on the whole excellent, as to be expected. Unfortunately the film tries to do too much, rather than focusing on moments that could have been breathtakingly powerful, but inevitably end up few and far between. Alas, for a story that is based on the life and perverted times of the Marquis de Sade, the film lacks anything vaguely resembling erotic manifestations, and the depth of the characters fails to reveal any long-lasting poignancy.
Worst of all is that the director, Philip Kaufman, almost ignores the fact that Kate Winslet is one of the most sensual, erotic actresses to grace the contemporary cinematic screen. He fails to put her talents to use ... and in a movie about the Marquis de Sade! If you don't see it here then where?
Kaufman has attempted to make the movie big-budget-hollywood while also trying to make it artsy-fartsy-deep-and-dark. Unfortunately, the way of the worl insists that one must choose one or the other and this is where QUILLS fails miserably. Not a psychologically disturbing thought lingers for as long as the credits roll...
Moll F.
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"Boring" and "artsy-fartsy" were also used to describe Kaufman's exquisite THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING. Like Anthony Minghella, the thematic richness of his work confounds the causual filmgoer, but rewards the more attentive viewer, which I'm willing to wager is the case with QUILLS. Regardless of how this film turns out, thanks to THE RIGHT STUFF, I'm a Kaufman fan for life.
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Kaufman's best work I reckon. Paranoid and wonderful and Jerry Garcia's in it too...
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Man, when you guys say spoilers, you mean spoilers. I usually don't read movie reviews with spoilers, but I figured there was little chance of me seeing this film any time soon, so I'll forget most of it. Well, maybe not because of all the images of cut out tongues and feces on walls. I have no knowledge of the life of the Marquis, so would you be so kind as to tell us if this story is even remotely true? It would be interesting to see how much is and how much isn't.
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Unfortunately, the movie seems to share absolutely no points of similarity with the truth about the Marquis. At the very least, one should be aware that the Marquis NEVER wanted ANY of his later works published. In fact, his last will and testament was that all of his works be burned and that no publications be ever made of them. Obviously, someone didn't listen. But we only have about 10% of what he wrote during his lifetime precisely because the vast majority was burned after he died. He wrote thousands of pages while he was in prison, on little scraps of paper - often the stuff given to him so that he could wipe his ass after taking a crap.
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I know a lot of people on here really like spoilers and it's an "at your own risk" situation with a review like this, but I just wonder why people feel they need to write an entire synopsis of a movie as a review instead of taking the time to break down their thoughts and feelings on WHY some things worked and some didn't. You don't have to go spoiler-free. For example, WHY did the necrophelia dream scene with the priest work? Was the characterization good? What did it represent or how did it change the way you look at the priest throughout the rest of the film? I'm not trying to criticize this writer, I just notice a lot of people who write in to AICN either summarize the whole movie plot point by plot point or give no plot at all and just say the movie was "cool" and mention their favorite actors in it. And it's funny because professional critics do it, too! There is a great middle ground out there that usually goes unexplored and it just kinda bugs me.
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I really like to read a review of a film I'm looking forward that has the word boring in it. It will then most likely be a great experience to go see this one. I hope Kaufman has made a great film once again after that stupid Rising Sun. But the word boring has a nice sound to it sometimes.
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Man,I'd love to be the stuntman on THAT set...Geoffrey Rush kicked ass in Mystery Men,the most underappreciatred film of the decade.If he can keep that crazy accent,that's enough to lure ME to the movie.Now,I think they should get Edward Norton to play shoe fetishist Chuck Jones.This has been a Cockroaches Bursting Out of E.G.'s Torso Moment with User ID Indeed!
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Closer....closer....
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Why the extreme summary-style reviews that we've seen today with "The Skulls" and "Quills"? Both were well-written, and I don't mind reading a good slam if I'm sure I'm not going to see a movie, but...isn't there a better middle ground between an abstract review of a film and an all-out summary with critiques? Setting some formal structure for reviews would be silly, but personally, I'd like to see reviews begin with a general overview of the premise and a somewhat abstract review, *and then* go on to specific scenes and elaborate critiques for those interested. Comments?
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If this film is half as boring as the review above, I'll go rent some bondage videos and buy thigh-high leather boots for my girlfriend.
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To paraphrase one of Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner's 1,000 year-old man routines. As for the review of QUILLS, well...it might just be me, but by the reviewer's tone I doubt she would have liked ANYTHING by Phil Kaufman, except maybe RISING SUN, and that was really Michael Crichton's baby. Speaking personally, I'd pay good money to see anything by Kaufman, let alone a period drama with actors as good as Rush, Caine and Kate. The whole thing on the face of it sounds like one of Ken Russell's capmy Classical Composer romps from the seventies (MAHLER, LIZTOMANIA, THE MUSIC LOVERS), but Kaufman is an intellectual giant compared to, say, Michael Bay, and I have hight hopes for this movie. Also, I believe the screenplay is by no less than Tom Stoppard, which is yet another reason to hang fire.
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Man. And I was looking forward to this movie. This movie is based on the *play* "Quills", by Doug Wright (I think), but someone apparently had a breakdown while adapting it for film. The play itself can be predictable at times, but overall it's a damn good exploration of our darker sides. When I heard Quills was being filmed, I thought 1.How're they gonna get all that violence past the MPAA?, and 2.Good lord I hope they don't mess with the plot. If it's turned into a typical shocker-movie (which it sounds like it has), I'm gonna be bitter as hell. Why keep all the sex and violence and ditch the message they carried? Why, why, why do people suck so much?!
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Big fan of Kaufman's here...only American filmmaker who has done a film with sensuality compararble to Last Tango and Paris. Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry & June were both daring and beautiful pieces of work (the former clearly more successful), and I'd have to say The Right Stuff is one of the 5 best films of the 80's. If only we had something like that now to make people give a shit about the space program (M2M? Space Cowboys? Right.) *** As for Rising Sun, I read an interview w/ Kaufman at the time of the film's release, and apparently Kaufman is an self-professed Asianphile (or whatever term you would use) who had a great respect for Japanese culture and felt that Crichton's book was unfairly slanted and inflammatory (even though the book's appendix shows Crichton did the research to back up his stuff). So Kaufman toned down the criticism of Japanese business practice (and some cultural issues) and turned it into a generic murder mystery. The book was very thought provoking and informative (although not quite relevant anymore, seeing as how Japanese businesses didn't quite run the U.S. into the ground), and I was a bit insulted that Kaufman wasn't more objective in his adaption.
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As a big KW fan I was really looking forward to this film as a few of her more recent films since the boat movie have been somewhat dissapointing due to less-than-stellar scripts and lackluster character development (Hideous Kinky, and Jane Campion's Holy Smoke).
After reading Doug Wright's play version of Quills I thought that this movie could be an awesome psychological delve into the psyche of the Marquis that aroused even the coldest fish and stirred up great debates regarding censorship, religion, politics, and sex. However it sounds more like just another 'get the damn movie shot and out the door.'
Bear
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