Film Review |
Movie Madness: The Dying Gaulby George Sax |
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Jeffrey is taking a meeting with a writer. Jeffrey (Campbell Scott) is a youngish, influential executive at one of the major Hollywood film studios
Robert (Peter Sarsgaard) is the young, unproduced scriptwriter in his office whose scenario, which gives Craig Lucas’ film its title, is named for the famous classical Roman sculpture of the tragically beautiful, mortally wounded young warrior. His script is about two gay men, which is the problem, Jeffrey is trying to explain.
“Most Americans hate gays. If they hear it’s about gay people, they won’t come. No one goes to the movies to have a bad time or to learn anything.”
The movie as its written, he says, “isn’t going to happen.”
But if Robert changes one of the men to a female, it can and will.
The script is based on Robert’s relationship with his late companion Malcolm, who was also his agent. Jeffrey’s suggestion is so disturbing to him that he stalks out of the office, and this meeting which he badly needs.
But Jeffrey, who pursues him, is so unctuously persuasive, and so seemingly well-intentioned, that shortly after this he finds himself before his computer, deleting 1172 uses of the name “Maurice” from the script, and substituting “Maggie.” In his meeting with Jeffrey, Robert had misspoke at one point, calling the character Malcolm. Now his capitulation seems like at least a symbolic betrayal, one which has earned him a cool million and an adulterous liaison with Jeffrey. (The movie is set in 1995, which is probably intended to be of some importance.)
The Dying Gaul, which Lucas adapted from his own play, seems during the first half-hour or so to be about the almost irresistible, seductive promise of success, and the gross disparities of power that underlie that unreliable promise. It seems to be an examination of these dynamics as they operate in Hollywood.
The movie’s atmosphere strengthens this impression. Steve Reich’s near-metronomically ominous score, the intensified light and colors of Bobby Bukowski’s cinematography, the frequent shots of brilliant skies with well-defined cloud formations, the camera’s recurring, sometimes oblique focus on angular modernist architecture—all these convey a sense of smooth, beautiful finishes overlaying a corruption of spirit.
But Lucas is after something else, something at once more personal and superficial. Jeffrey’s wife Elaine (Patricia Clarkson) and Robert take an affectionate shine to each other, and after she pries from him an admission of his use of gay computer chat rooms, she amuses herself by pretending to be an online male sexual prowler in exchanges with Robert. And learns, of course, of his affair with her husband.
Her curious revenge is to obtain intimate information about Robert—how is only barely implied—and use it to pose as the shade of Malcolm in these internet exchanges. This begins the eventually violent unhinging of the mild, empathetic young writer.
It’s hard to discern which of this strange triad Lucas thinks is the real victim of their combined moral lapses. By raising the stakes as high as he does, and making the losses so terrible, Lucas may have intended to convey moral ambiguities and ironies.
What he has delivered, however, is more obscure and arbitrary. Lucas’ professional experience in films has been as a writer, but this movie’s narrative developments seem lumpy and capricious. The Dying Gaul winds up an off-putting stew of overheated implausibilities and melodramatic creepiness.
The excellent actors dutifully, indeed impressively, go about their portrayals, but they can’t escape Lucas’ ill-formed script. If he had an aesthetic or moral vision, he hasn’t realized it.
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