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Film
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The Dying Gaul
It’s a very poor man’s version of Closer, with four characters chopped down to three, and Peter Sarsgaard and Campbell Scott standing in for Clive Owen and Jude Law.
Friday, November 4, 2005
By Kevin Biggers
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Strand Releasing
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Writer-director Lucas
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After the war between the Romans and the barbarian Gauls in Hellenist Greece (circa 223 B.C.), the victorious Romans erected a statue of a man, the Dying Gaul, which depicted their fallen warriors in a light that elevated the strength of the Romans and at the same time, encouraged extolments for their fallen enemy.
The Romans cast the original Dying Gaul in bronze and evinced the sculpted warrior hoisting himself up, awaiting death. Blood flows, from a singular but fatal hole, and hides near his pectoral, while his weakening upper body fights against the slinking lower body. Historians critical of the Romans described the statue as an exemplar of the strength of the Gauls, who were persecuted by the overwhelming Romans and yet continued to fight to their death.
The reference to this statue in The Dying Gaul, a film written and directed by Craig Lucas, is somewhat murky. There is a screenplay titled “The Dying Gaul” written by Robert, one of the film’s three main characters, which compares the Hellenistic statue to his dead lover Malcolm. The film also suggests similarities between the statue and Robert, who for most of the film seems ready to die from the torturous loneliness.
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Strand Releasing
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Double duty this weekend for Sarsgaard
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However, neither of these two connections to the statue is ever developed in the film. The first notion suggests this is a film a la Philadelphia, pitting a homosexual dying of AIDS against society. Not here. The second notion suggests that Robert will be dead by the time the credits begin rolling. Not here. The point? There is no point.
The film essays the emotionally taut triangle of Robert (Jarhead’s Peter Sarsgaard), a codependent encumbered screenwriter, Jeffrey (Campbell Scott), an ambitious and cocky studio executive, and Jeffrey’s wife Elaine (Patricia Clarkson), a former screenwriter turned vacuous housewife. On the surface, Jeffrey wants Robert’s screenplay but soon enough we learn that Jeffrey, a bisexual, desires Robert - despite his relatively seamless marriage to Elaine.
Via several chat room encounters between Elaine and an unbeknownst Robert in addition to Elaine’s attainment of Robert’s diaries, letters and computer files (never explained), Elaine is able to manipulate Robert into thinking she’s Malcolm and more specifically cast a sense of blame and expose guilt in Robert, who injected the comatose Malcolm with a lethal drug. As Robert begins doubting his actions and blaming Jeffrey for the chat room encounters, a series of dangerous consequences ensue.
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Strand Releasing
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Rent Off the Map instead
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Lucas’s big misstep is his misuse of Campbell Scott, who seems more like an innocent bystander, somewhat of an in-screen audience for what turns out to be a psychological battle between Elaine and Robert. This is not the same actor who delighted as the fast-talking, egregious uncle in Roger Dodger or dazzled as the delusional dentist in The Secret Lives of Dentists, which was adapted by Lucas. While Lucas colors Jeffrey with a few idiosyncrasies and quirks, and earnestly tries to paint Jeffrey as a polar opposite to The Player’s Griffin Mill, he fails to realize that when you take the proverbial bite out of the dog, it’s not nearly as effective.
Both Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard bestow the film with modest performances, but Lucas fails to engender an interesting back story for Elaine, who feels like an incomplete painting on the wall of a gallery. The writer-director also doesn’t quite manage to sculpt Robert into a thematic centerpiece, something that even if he had succeeded, would still have likely been undone by the film’s final twenty minutes.
For some unknown reason, the story turns at that point from a modest character study into a tenebrous thriller. Is this in fact what Mr. Lucas had intended all along? Is this ultimately supposed to essay the ‘dangerous’ underworld of the Hollywood elite? The Dying Gaul is not a particularly bad film as much as it’s a remarkably disappointing and unassuming film.
While avoiding trite circumstances, the story becomes overwhelmingly boring and drearily convoluted. As such, it marks a step backwards in the burgeoning film career of Lucas, who perhaps thankfully has a well established theatre career to fall back on.
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