Where's the Love?

When Doug Wright's Quills was an Off Broadway play, I lambasted it in New York magazine. Now, in Wright's movie adaptation, it is much more elaborate and, if possible, worse yet. There is an essay by Wright in the press kit that reveals his subliteracy. He refers to Sade as "a professor emeritus of Evil," obviously not knowing the meaning of emeritus. He says that as Sade's name is the root of the term sadism, the Marquis's contribution to culture was "entomological." And he is a lousy reader, averring that in La Philosophie dans le boudoir, "an elderly dowager is forcibly infected with syphilis," even though Madame de Mistival is neither a widow nor over 32, which makes her ineligible for either possible meaning of Wright's pleonasm Here is how Wright writes: "The stories seem to spring-like gorgons-from a vast, ever-replenished well of rage." Gorgons, of whom there were only three, did not spring from any well; they were the malformed daughters of Phorcys and Ceto. Sade, we read, "writes to vent at the hypocritical forces which oppress him," which, aside from the misuse of vent without an object, speaks well for Sade. Yet "he registers as an amalgam of our basest appetites, stripped bare," which, besides being a mixed metaphor, speaks, contradictorily, ill of him. And Wright gets his facts wrong: Sade did not spend "over 30 years" in prison, but 27, which, to be sure, is bad enough. Wright admits that much of his story is fiction, which I would allow him so long as the fiction is good and does not blatantly contradict the known facts. The movie, however, is an extended clean dirty joke, titillating with bits of routine raunchiness, but never delving for deeper insight. And much of it is grossly derivative.

For example, Wright has Sade staging an obscene play at Charenton, the madhouse where he lived in relative comfort; what he actually put on were comedies in the manner of Marivaux. What is more, the play scathingly satirizes Dr. Royer-Collard, the asylum's medical head, which would have been doubly disallowed. Performing this before the draconian doctor to embarrass him is, of course, Hamlet's famous strategy vis-a-vis Claudius. Again, the Abbe Coulmier (in real life a four-foot hunchback; here played by the tall and sexy Joaquin Phoenix), the spiritual head of Charenton, is made to lose the self-control with which he undeclaredly yearns for the pretty young laundress Madeleine (Kate Winslet); when she dies, he goes berserk with uncontrollable lust. This is a steal from Anatole France's novel Thais, and Massenet's opera based on it; but neither source lets the good abbe have necrophiliac intercourse with the dead young woman.

Whether or not Geoffrey Rush gives a true performance as Sade is overshadowed by his having to play his last scenes in the nude, although I doubt if anyone will derive much pleasure from the sight. Philip Kaufman, a pseudointellectual director, has directed with some flair and much specious fancifulness. Quills provides few chills and fewer thrills.

---The action flick Proof of Life opens with Peter Bowman, an American engineer working on a dam in a fictional South American country, Tecala, being abducted by Marxist guerrillas and held in a mountain hideaway for a $3 million ransom. The U.S. diplomats are no help whatever to his panicky wife, Alice: Still less so are the greedy Texas oil-company men planning a pipeline that the rebels reprehend as colonization. Bowman's U.S. employer has gone bust; the captive is no longer covered by insurance. Alice, even with the help of Peter's nervous spinster sister, Janis, who arrives from the U.S., can at best raise $600,000.

The two women engage the services of Terry Thorne, an Australian expert in K&R (kidnap and ransom) negotiations, who, at first, drops the job and returns to his London base. But he hotfoots it back to Tecala to deliver the two desperate women from the services of a corrupt Tecalan negotiator. Terry seems to be smitten with Alice, and as he deploys his tough, canny negotiating skills, she reciprocates the attraction. Corruption is everywhere in Tecala, among the government people and the rebels alike. The latter transfer Peter from the picturesque Andes to the even more picturesque rain forests, presumably so the director, Taylor Hackford, and his cameraman, Slawomir Idziak, can give us plenty of lush panoramas. (Most of the movie was shot in Ecuador.)

The film, though based on a piece of investigative journalism and, more remotely, the true-life story of an American's kidnapping in Colombia, is an awkward retread of Casablanca, as others, too, have noticed. The triangle (such as it is) of Peter-Alice-Terry duplicates a similar one in the beloved 1942 film, and the noble self-sacrifice in the final airport scene is far more Casablanca than Tecala.

As the captured Peter, David Morse suffers doughtily, but Meg Ryan manages to simultaneously over- and underact as Alice. Pamela Reed, a fine actress, gets little to do but worry as Janis. Russell Crowe, as Terry, exudes his special brand of hangdog sexiness-stolid or surly on top, sensitive and melancholy beneath-and I can see its appeal to women. The American diplomats are properly ineffectual or calculating; the Tecalans range from decent to brutish, from servile to sinister, as Tecalans should. It all ends in a huge shoot-'em-up, which Hackford doesn't quite know how to direct; but he and his Polish cinematographer do know how to make Ecuador look alluring.