As Quills builds to its violent and over ripe conclusion, I am reminded of the words of The Old Man (Darrin McGavin) in Bob Clark’s great yuletide tale A Christmas Story. Sipping Christmas nosh, McGavin notes, “This wine isn’t bad. It isn’t good either. But it isn’t bad.” That’s how I feel about this film. The accomplished and generally interesting director Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being) has fashioned a film that sits uncomfortably beside other revisionist bio-pics like Amadeus (though that one lacks Quills’ consistency of tone), which are aimed at pleasing literate and discriminating moviegoers, but do so at the expense of subtlety. Kaufman’s film, a strange hybrid of Masterpiece Theatre and Grand Guignol, is sure to offend the more sensitive in his high brow audience with its full frontal male nudity and concluding scenes of graphic and gruesome violence, while boring those who come to be titillated by the tale of the life, love and writing of the controversial Marquis de Sade.
To be fair, Quills opens promisingly, with an inventive passage connecting the explosive violence of the Reign of Terror to the sexual release provided by the writings of the Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush, who shamelessly hams it up in the central role). I had some real hope that this was going to be a film that explored these themes with some intelligence and grit. Instead, what we get is a Marquis de Sade who is more Oscar Wilde than Rabelais, casting bon mots at his tormentors and admirers, while his captors – led by a wild-eyed Michael Caine as the sexually repressed and repressive Dr. Royer-Callard, and the more liberal-minded but equally repressed Abbe of the insane asylum, played no more than adequately by Joaquin Phoenix – gradually strip the Marquis of material comforts, in an effort to degrade and tame him. His only solace, the comely (though virginal) chambermaid Madeleine ( Kate Winslet’s brave and sensual performance almost saves this film), who steals his works from his nuthouse prison so they can be published and disseminated throughout a freshly-liberated French populace.
Quills asks interesting questions that certainly have contemporary relevance, particularly considering all the barbs aimed at the movie and music industry every time a teenager emulates a violent act described or witnessed in either medium. Do artists have a responsibility to protect from itself a vulnerable audience susceptible to suggestion? Or should artists be completely free from all restraints, so they can comment freely and openly upon human behaviour? Do authorities have the right to protect us from such art, and from our own “baser” instincts? However, the film chooses to almost invariably take the easy route; the jokes are quick, witty, and obvious; the satire is blatant and so one-sided as to be farcical; and the final one-third of the film goes so over the top that the acts of the central characters push it to the borderline of the surreal.
