Geoffrey Rush plays the Marquis as a snickering fop, a wicked wag whose compulsion to write staggers across the threshold of madness. Joaquin Phoenix cuts a suave figure as the solicitous and well-meaning priest, who believes in art therapy instead of straitjackets, and hopes Sade's writings will serve as catharsis for the patient. His opposite number, Michael Caine, is wonderfully cold and calculating as the alienist, a man whose scientific pretensions include torture as a cure for psychosis. And Kate Winslet is alive to the world in every fiber as the bodice-filling washwoman who befriends the Marquis. Quills sets itself up admirably before spinning out of control into a tortured fantasy worthy of Peter Greenaway, surely Sade's principal heir in the postmodern age.
Fact is better than fiction.
Perhaps Quills is meant to mimic the bloody fantasy of Sade's own writing, where he imagined excesses he never committed. The existence of Quills testifies that the frisson of Sade's name hasn't lessened in the centuries since his death. Sade foreshadowed Freud's idea that at the bottom of human nature lies voracious sex, forever yanking at the chains with which civilization binds it. But Sade's pleasure principle involved the degradation of his partners, lending his name to the association of sex with cruelty. The indolent aristocrat who helped sexualize the world's imagination continues to provoke shock, argument and theater, a form of expression he also dabbled in.