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The Dying Gaul
There's poison in the garden
2005
Review: November 16, 2005
Director: Craig Lucas
Starring: Peter Sarsgaard, Campbell Scott, Patricia Clarkson
No, keep your wits about you.
THE SETUP:
Screenwriter is asked to turn his script about his lovers death from AIDS into a heterosexual weeper. Then he gets involved [to say the least] with his producer and his wife.
DISCUSSION:
From Craig Lucas, who brought us Longtime Companion and Prelude to a Kiss, comes this movie, which is much darker in tone and much more challenging as a film than either of those. Peter Sargaard stars as a gay screenwriter who has just sold his script, called The Dying Gaul. It tells the story of his lover’s death from AIDS, and is based around a metaphor related to the famous Roman sculpture of the title. The thing about the sculpture is that it sensitively depicts a dying soldier of the enemy’s army, and so is normally taken to represent the ability to have empathy for one’s enemy. Keep this in mind kids, it wasn’t chosen by accident.
So Jeffery, the producer who buys the script, played by Campbell Scott, makes a condition of the sale that Robert change the dying character to a woman, as “everyone hates gays,” and “people don’t come to movies to feel bad or to learn, you have to lure them in and then deliver a lesson.” These, also, are notes to keep in mind. At first Robert refuses, but he is offered a million dollars, and he needs that money. He intends to use part of it for the education of his son, who he had when married to a woman. We later find out that his lover who died was the brother of his former wife, which carefully hints at Robert’s shifty morals. And, like many people with malleable morals, Robert professes to be a Buddhist.
Soon we are introduced to Jeffery’s wife Elaine, played by Patricia Clarkson. She is shown, several times, in a white bikini [who knew she had such a slender, lithe body?]. You will note that she is the only one who’s body is exposed and sexually available, yet it soon becomes clear that no one, least of all her husband, is interested. This leads to the kind of sad isolation and bitter resentment you might expect.
Soon Robert is introduced to Elaine, when they go a screening of one of Jeffery’s movies. We hear a clip in which a character on-screen says “turns out he was a fag” and everyone in the audience laughs. Elaine positions herself as a confidant to Robert, one who understands how he feels and stands for his principles [she was formerly a screenwriter herself]. She elicits from him that one of the ways he dulls the pain of being bereft by his lover’s death is by perusing chatrooms, and she gets the name of his favorite one.
Meanwhile, Jeffery is coming on hard to Robert, and we find out later that Robert has given in. Later the night of the screening, Elaine invents a name and finds Robert [DGBottom] in the chatroom. She asks if he’s seeing anyone, and it’s revealed to her that he’s fucking her husband! At this moment, the sprinkler outside begins hitting the window in rhythmic bursts no doubt meant to evoke ejaculate. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, intrusive, blunt male sexuality is indeed knocking at her window. Clarkson’s performance in this scene, and really all throughout the movie, is superb.
Driven by a complex web of emotions that are at once well-drawn and yet never spelled out, Elaine invents a new screen name, “ArckAngel,” and writes Robert, claiming to be his dead lover. This sends Robert into an emotional spin of renewed grief and guilt, both at changing his screenplay and having the affair with Jeffery. Elaine continues as Robert’s friend and confidant, and the whole mess starts getting more taut, more sordid, and more ugly. The ending came as a surprise to me, but one that will leave you with a lot to think about and piece back together.
So let’s get back to the theme of empathy for one’s enemy. Elaine definitely gets to understand Robert’s pain, though she is resistant to feeling it because of her own situation. Robert comes to gain a clear understanding of Elaine’s heartache, though again he has his own reasons for not letting himself be moved by it. At the end I believe we are supposed to gain an understanding of Jeffery’s situation, but I’m not quite sure it works. The final image of the movie is Jeffery mimicking the posture of The Dying Gaul. It’s good and it works in a structural way, but I’m still unsure whether it works emotionally. My friend and I had a long discussion over dinner about whether it was an accomplishment or a failure of the film that neither of us were moved by the character’s predicaments. I felt for each of the character’s, yet they are all so morally flawed that it is difficult to truly feel empathy for them, which keeps the movie on an emotionally distant, cerebral level. Again, is this purposeful? Neither me nor my friend could tell for sure.
On senses that the final image of Jeffery in the posture of The Dying Gaul is supposed to bring all of the emotional themes into focus, but one recognizes it without being moved by it. Contrast this to the ending of the Tarkovsky Solaris, in which father and son fall into the posture from Rembrandt’s The Prodigal Son, which both works as an image unto itself and whomps viewers with the cultural resonance of the painting. It doesn’t quite have the same effect here—I confess to being unsure as to whether it was supposed to—but it’s still very interesting and makes one respect the structure and craft of the film and screenplay.
The performances throughout are uniformly wonderful. Patricia Clarkson really is a knockout with her extremely convincing portrayal of a woman who has become trapped by her luxuries and staid marriage. Peter Sargaard gives a very nuanced performance as a very specific type of gay person who seems to be nonplussed by everything and not involved in anything, and on top of that who has experienced a terrible loss over the past few months. Campbell Scott is dryly funny at first as a movie executive who is lying at almost every moment, and his more emotional scenes toward the end also work well, though his character is the least well-drawn of the three.
The structure and metaphorical significance of the story will give you a lot to think about after the film is over. It’s unusual for a film to be so well-thought out and interesting on so many levels these days, and it seems to be one of the best entries in the field of gay films, which finally seems to be heading away from coming-out stories and tales of pretty twits into more serious fare. I’m not sure it all works in the end, but the depth of the characters, the interesting and well-thought-out writing and structure, and the excellent performances all make this definitely one worth watching. Now that I have a website I’ll be able to make my “best of 2005” list in a few months, and I feel pretty confident that this one will be on it.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
Fo’ Shizz. It’s one of the deepest and most interesting movies I’ve seen in some time.
