| Quills News & Reviews |
| Dec 17 Ft.Worth Star Telegram http://www.star-telegram.com/justgo/ `Quills' a whitewash of a dark provocateur By Christopher Kelly Star-Telegram Film Critic The director Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff) has done the seemingly impossible with Quills: He has made a wholly tasteful movie about the Marquis de Sade. This should not be taken as praise. The characters in Quills look and sound as if they just stepped out of the most bloodless Merchant-Ivory movie ever made. To be sure, bosoms heave, clothes come off, and the subject is most certainly sex. But never once does Kaufman attempt to unsettle or even challenge his audience. Quills is a porn movie for the blue-haired set. Based on a play by Doug Wright (who also wrote the script), the picture fictionalizes the final years of the Marquis (Geoffrey Rush). Imprisoned in the Charenton mental asylum for his obscene books, he nonetheless continues to write and publish. A laundress (Kate Winslet) smuggles in parchment and quills and smuggles out his manuscripts. The authorities -- Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine), the psychologist dispatched by Napoleon to keep watch over the Marquis, and Abbe Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), the repressed young priest who runs Charenton -- do everything in their power to stop him. There's nothing particularly wrong with using the Marquis de Sade to make a point about the importance of free speech, as Kaufman and Wright do here. But that's about the only point they make. Dr. Royer-Collard and Coulmier take away the Marquis' paper and ink; the Marquis writes on his clothing with wine. They strip him of clothes and deny him wine; the Marquis uses his blood and the bare walls. The movie works itself into a self-congratulatory frenzy; the Marquis de Sade may be writing naughty stuff, it tells us, but he'll never be as narrow-minded and destructive as those who are determined to silence him. But what of the film's Marquis de Sade? On the basis of Quills, those unfamiliar with his work might assume he churned out nothing more than bawdy erotica -- the literary equivalent of Cinemax After Dark. In fact, books like Justine and 120 Days of Sodom are replete with necrophilia, coprophagy, mutilation and the rape and torture of children. In the form of Geoffrey Rush, this Marquis is a scrawny, fey and irrepressible scamp, a lovable schoolboy who won't stop using dirty words, no matter how many times his mouth is washed out with soap. In his scenes with Coulmier, he cajoles and teases the priest, pushing him to the brink of sexual impropriety in the name of unlocking this young man's repression. Is the implication that the Marquis de Sade was a Dr. Ruth-style sex therapist 200 years ahead of his time? Actually, the better question is this: What are Kaufman and Wright so afraid of? If Quills wants us to see the Marquis as a sexual revolutionary, it needs to make us understand the genuine danger his work presented. It needs to force us to question our own values regarding censorship and obscenity. Instead, the filmmakers prefer to coddle their viewers while patting themselves on the back for their own liberal viewpoints. One wonders what's next on their agenda: the PG-13 rated biopic of Marilyn Chambers starring Britney Spears? Quills was recently awarded the Best Picture of 2000 prize by the prestigious National Board of Review, and it now seems on track to score multiple Oscar nominations -- a triumph for reductive, one-note cinema everywhere. To be fair, the actors all bring talent and enthusiasm to their parts (particularly Phoenix), and the film has a few amusing bits (such as when the Marquis stages a bawdy play for Dr. Royer-Collard). But surely we can do better than filmmaking that pretends to be fiery by preaching hot air to the converted. Quills is rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, violence and strong language -- none of it disturbing enough. |
| Dec17,2000 'Quills' probes the limits of free expression with a portrait of the wicked French nobleman who did the same. By David Chute Entertainment News Service Ft.Worth Star Telegram The timing couldn't have been better for a small film in need of hype. The Federal Trade Commission issued it's scathing report on Hollywood's sneaky practice of marketing films with extreme content to children on Sep 11, leading Hollywood-bashers in Washington to pile on in an election year. Just a few days later, director Philip Kaufman arrived in Los Angeles from his home in San Francisco. He had come south to discuss his film 'Quills' an ink-black gothic farce about the extremes of free expression under siege, which was screening at the Telluride Film festival. The R-rated film's irrepressible centerpiece (portrayed with relish by Oscar- Winner, Geoffrey Rush) is none other than Marquis de Sade, the 18th- century pornographer and revolutionary misanthrope whose novels have linked his name for all time with the rougher and more bizarre forms of sexuality. As the director of the first film ever saddled with an NC-17 rating, 'Henry & June' (1990), Kaufman would seem to be the perfect person to weigh in on the FTC report and related issues -- or to make a movie that addresses them by implication. And he seems to know this. "My wife Rose came up with the perfect ad line" for 'Quills', Kaufman offers with a characteristic glean of irony: " 'Not a movie for children of all ages.' " Politicians can rest easy; unlike other R-rated fare, 'Quills' which opened Friday, isn't being marketed to the under-17 crowd. Kaufman, 64, and Fox Searchlight know it's definitely a spicy meal, suitable only for adult palates. But politicians might nevertheless squirm over the film's message. Like 'Henry & June,' 'Quills' has a both strong and intellectual and sexual charge. As the movie opens, the marquis has been locked away in a lunatic asylum in Charenton, near Paris. There, Sade purges his insatiable demons on paper and smuggles his work to a fly-by-night printer. The result inevitably and to the marquis's delight, is an open scandal. The main action of the film revolves around a battle of wills between the marquis and a repressive "alienist" (Michael Caine), who has been dispatched by Napoleon to clamp the lid down hard upon Sade's "creativity." For Kaufman, whose Walrus & Assoc. production company is a family affair made up of wife Rose and son Peter, "the movie is an entertainment about the game of cat and mouse and the marquis plays with his enemies...and about the ingenuity that obsessed writer summons to get around attempts to silence him." At the same time, he admits, "the film really is about the issue of free speech -- about expression and the repression of expression." In fact, the free-speech angle was deliberately beefed up during the films development process by screenwriter Doug Wright, who adapted his 1995 play. To his credit, Kaufman, who directing credits include 'The Right Stuff' and 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being,' never tries to palm off Rush's snarling marquis as an innocent martyr with inconvenient ideas. "I don't think we whitewash the marquis at all," Kaufman declares. "As Wright portrays him, he is selfish and duplicitous and brutal, an aristocrat elitist who smacks his wife around. He is a terrible man." But he was also, the director believes, "the most extreme test case ever, to this day" of a society's willingness to tolerate it's most assaultive voices. To make this point, though Kaufman and Wright made what might become a controversial decision to soften the content of the scabrous novels. The film creates several less-gruesome passages of pseudo-Sadian fiction in the place of the real thing, even suggesting that Sade's wrk can be stimulating to readers in healthy and liberating ways. Leading one question whether it is right to hold up a notorious writer as an icon of free expression and then withhold or water down his actual words. After all, another fact-based film, Milos Freeman's 'The People vs. Larry Flint,' was scammed for failing to acknowledge the repulsive, misogynistic character of the images that Flint often publishes in 'Hustler' magazine. For screenwriter Wright, however, there's a fundamental difference: "Larry Flynt was trafficking imagery, and the marquis was trafficking in language." I think if you really read Sade's fiction you will find that he describes things in such a baroque and over-the-top fashion that they are biologically impossible. It becomes a phantasmagoric linguistic riff on perversity that has no visual component. As such, I think we can only regard him as a satirist. To simply present him as the Hannibal Lecture of literature felt reductive to me. I thought the most subversive thing I could do was give him back his wicked wink, his sense of humor." |
| Dec 13 This article accompanies the 'Quills' promotional ad here. "High Hopes - Studio sources describe their respective Oscar dreams - as well as hint at strategies," by Cathy DunkleyFox Searchlight Pictures -- The Fox-based indie company will put its weight behind one film, its Marquis de Sade drama "Quills." "We are really excited about 'Quills,' because it represents the best of what independent film can do," says Nancy Utley, president of marketing for Fox Searchlight. "The subject matter is daring, and each of the performances goes very far in what the actors do."The film will receive a Best Picture campaign as well as the company's backing of Philip Kaufman for Best Director, Geoffrey Rush for Best Actor and Joaquin Phoenix and last year's Best Supporting Oscar winner Michael Caine in the Supporting Actor category. Kate Winslet is also expected to be promoted in the Best Supporting Actress category as is Doug Wright for Best Adapted Screenplay, costume design for Jacqueline West and production design for Martin Childs and editing for Peter Boyle. |