Grade: D-

Verdict: Pointless.

Details: Starring Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet and Michael Caine. Directed by Philip Kaufman. Rated R for violence, language and strong sexual content (including near rape and a suggestion of necrophilia). Two hours, 4 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: “Quills” looks like Oscar material. And it sounds like Oscar material. And its stars (Geoffrey Rush, Kate Winslet, Michael Caine) and its director (the reputable Philip Kaufman) are certainly Oscar material.

But for all its tony trappings and supposedly “daring” black comedy, “Quills,” recently voted the year's best picture by the National Board of Review, is shrill, pretentious, sophomoric and often just plain dumb. Based on a play by Doug Wright — who must've seen Peter Weiss' “Marat/Sade” a few times too many as an undergrad — “Quills” is a highly fictionalized account of the final days of the Marquis de Sade. The marquis, who added the word sadism to our vocabulary, scandalized 18th-century France in general and Emperor Napoleon in particular with his erotic — to some tastes, obscene — novels.

Once we get past a brief prologue reminding us of the excessive horrors of the French Revolution, the movie deposits us several years later at the Charenton Asylum for the Insane where the marquis (“Shine's” Oscar-winning Rush) lives in luxurious, albeit restricted, circumstances. His cell is full of fine furniture, fine wines and enough quills to write page after page of blasphemous erotica (well, in this movie's terms, Bad People think it's blasphemous and Good People don't).

How does he get his work from inside Charenton to the outside world? Easy. A comely laundress named Madeleine (played with bodice-busting gusto by Winslet) smuggles his work to a courier who takes them to an underground publisher in Paris. Et voilà — Parisians in search of a quick turn-on can read “Justine” or “120 Days of Sodom.”

Napoleon isn't amused by de Sade's lusty priests and violated nuns. He dispatches a kind of tough-love advocate, Dr. Royer-Collard (Caine in his stern mode), to rehabilitate the marquis. Of course, the doctor is a hypocrite and more of a sadist than you-know-who. He quickly clashes with the humane Abbe Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), who believes that allowing his patient to write nasty books purges him of other, more dangerous toxins. But Royer-Collard has the upper hand. He takes away de Sade's ink and quills; the marquis responds by writing with wine, then with his own blood and, ultimately, with his own feces.

The point is the rather obvious observation that censorship is bad and artistic freedom is good.

True enough, but for most of us, hardly a revolutionary notion.

Unfortunately, Wright's overwrought script rants and raves as much as the supporting loonies at Charenton. But instead of insight or even provocation, he offers us slavering vulgarity, smug posturing and wink-wink, nudge-nudge double-entendres along the schoolboyish lines of “the price is every bit as firm as I am!” (that's Rush to Winslet).

Rush acts up a storm. Which is to say he embraces nudity and excrement with an I-want-another-Oscar enthusiasm. Ultimately, his performance seems like a showy, self-congratulatory masquerade. By contrast, Caine coasts in a one-note role. Winslet brings some wit and high spirits to her silly part. But Phoenix is abysmal as the character who's supposed to be the movie's moral and dramatic fulcrum.

Still, the actors aren't the culprits. That honor goes to the author who confuses overripe idiocy with daring and to the director who takes a nasty-as-we-want-to-be approach to the material. By the time “Quills” lurches to its god-awful Grand Guignol finale, we're neither shocked nor titillated. Just a bit embarrassed for everyone involved.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Cox News Service