film | The scribe, the creep, his wife and her cover

For a textbook example of how wrong wrong wrong a movie can go just when you think it can't get no righter, check out THE DYING GAUL. The gleefully nasty first 30 minutes of this complex drama from playwright Craig Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss) practically crumble under the weight of their own deliciousness: A schmucky studio executive (Campbell Scott, elevating Hollywood smarm to an art form) woos a sadsack writer (the amazing Peter Sarsgaard of Shattered Glass) whose autobiographical screenplay concerns a man who loses his boyfriend to AIDS. Scott wants to buy it and change the doomed lover's gender, citing that "America hates gay people," and he suggests Sarsgaard stick around and make the switch himself, since, of course, he wants to get in Sarsgaard's pants. In a year when approval numbers regarding same-sex marriage are rising because, the media offers, TV news isn't reporting on it as much — not to mention the cowboy-on-cowboy tearjerker Brokeback Mountain grossing a stunning $80 million, winning countless critical accolades and nearly every top cinema honor around, and then losing (for whatever reason) the best-picture award at the Oscars — this is one lip-smackingly topical premise.

Into the tawdry situation slinks Scott's ex-scribe wife (Pieces of April's compulsively watchable Patricia Clarkson) — yep, he's married — who reads Sarsgaard's unedited script and develops her own fascination with him. At this point, The Dying Gaul could spin into about a thousand different intriguing directions, but the film unfortunately sidesteps them all and suddenly becomes a weird amalgamation of a cracked-out Touched by an Angel episode and a cautionary After School Special on the dangers of internet anonymity. A lot of the big dramatic moments in the concluding hour involve Clarkson and Sarsgaard conducting a series of chat-room rendezvous that rely on: A) Clarkson knowing information you're never entirely clear how she got; and B) Sarsgaard reacting in an unconvincingly metaphysical and rather idiotic way. The movie essentially dooms itself to interminably hokey passages in which the actors look into the camera and voice the back-and-forth chatter they're typing, a stilted device that clashes with the whole cinematic thing but probably feels less garish on stage (where Gaul originated in 1998). The same goes for the tacky mock-Shakespearean conclusion, with its split-second timing and poison botany. Despite three master-class performances, most of The Dying Gaul ends up frustratingly lost in translation. C-