Royer-Collard strives to squelch Sade under the orders of Napoleon himself. But the movie doesn't let the abbe off his own peculiar hook. The movie proves the doctor correct. By the end, the abbe confronts his complicity in one death and his active role in another. When he recognizes his lust and bloodlust, his worldview shatters and re-forms.
Phoenix is amazing as the abbe.
The rest of the cast is like a wish list of British Commonwealth performers who've broken through to international audiences. Here, once again, they show us why. And Winslet is an unsentimental heartbreaker, imbuing Madeleine with a lucid native intelligence that allows us to respond to everything that titillates her without letting it swamp the virtue and good nature of her character. More important, because the Marquis' voice frames the film in two spine-tingling strokes, we see it as a sort of Sadean tale that Sade himself could never write. For Kaufman, in this new millennium, what's daring is to make each character the center of his or her own personal morality play, and to salute the pulse-quickening compulsiveness and danger of art.