The true story of the Marquis de Sade bears only slight resemblance to the tale told by Quills . In fact, the real story of the infamous aristocrat's confinement in a posh insane asylum during Napoleon's reign is entirely more interesting than this overripe dish, based on Doug Wright's play and served by director Philip Kaufman, whose mixed career includes his well-made take on Tom Wolf's The Right Stuff and his pretentiously empty staging of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being . But farcical and inauthentic as it is, Quills is at least an interesting piece of fiction, until the imagination of its author and interpreter overheats in the final scenes, reducing it to a lurid bloodbath. Quills makes no case for Sade's literary merits. It says that by depriving him of his quills, the pens of the powdered-wig epoch, his keepers deprived him of his freedom, even when admitting that Sade's potboilers of sex and violence, his identification of the one with the other, had the power to influence cretins by their example.
Quills is vitalized by terrific acting.
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.