The Dying Gaul is one of those complex relationship movies whose success rises or falls on the strength of its actors. Without them, the thin veneer that separates its complex, lyrical script from a fussy, over-literate one dissolves. This is often the case of plays transferred to the big screen. Badly cast, the words resist, the attempts to ‘open up’ the play become all too obvious, and the roar of the greasepaint blatantly apparent. Six Degrees of Separation comes to mind. Though Stockard Channing and Donald Sutherland were acting forces to behold, Will Smith’s inexperience in one of the leading roles effectively hobbled director Fred Schepisi’s otherwise glorious movie. Proof similarly suffered from the wrong casting of Jake Gyllenhaal in a key role as a math nerd.
This was the first thought that came to mind as the credits rolled on The Dying Gaul. Thank God Craig Lucas, who wrote the play, the screenplay, and makes his feature debut here, had the good fortune to have perfect casting in Patricia Clarkson, Peter Sarsgaard and Campbell Scott. Together they enact this tragic triptych so beautifully that the difficult material soars. It’s a wonderful movie but the elation comes from watching actors doing their best and not from what they’re caught up in doing. That’s a tiny but important distinction because though The Dying Gaul is such a good movie, it’s not a likeable or emotionally easy one.
At the outset, in the year 1995, the guarded writer Robert (Sarsgaard) sells his screenplay, entitled ‘The Dying Gaul,’ to the equally obnoxious confident studio executive Jeffrey (Campbell). Robert is grief-stricken after losing his lover and horrified when Jeffrey tells him that the only way he’ll buy the script is if Robert will change it from a gay love story into a straight one. But the lure of the million dollar fee he will get and the chance to do the rewrites is strong enough for Robert to make the concession. Soon after, two pivotal things happen: Robert and Jeffrey begin an affair and Robert meets Elaine (Clarkson), Jeffrey’s wife.
The connection between Robert and Jeffrey is tentative at best while the one between Robert and Elaine is immediate. Lucas gets the often extraordinary connection between gay men and straight women on the screen. We see that Robert tolerates Jeffrey and lets him use his body as a way to expunge his grief but with Elaine he allows himself to be vulnerable and honest. During a visit to the couple’s mouth-dropping mansion, Robert tells her about nightly visits to online chat rooms and Elaine, a stifled writer herself and intrigued by the possibilities, creates an online personality and quickly discovers Robert’s identity. Their online chats soon become an emotional therapy for both but when Robert innocently reveals that he’s sleeping with the wife of the man he’s working for, the horrified Elaine ups the ante. Through details that she intuits or has learned from Robert, she convinces him that he’s chatting online with the spirit of his dead lover. Some of the things she writes startle and scare Robert with their perception and Lucas presents them in close-up bathed in a halo of light accompanied by the austere beauty of minimalist Steve Reich’s music. The decision to use Reich’s chilly music throughout is a brilliant stroke by Lucas that seems to portend the movie’s surprising conclusion.
The openly gay Lucas wrote the seminal Longtime Companion and returns—after a 15-year absence—to a gay-themed work. But the gay-bisexual-straight sexuality of the trio at the center of The Dying Gaul is really beside the point. This is a movie about the dangers of secrets and lies—those we tell ourselves and to others—the consequences and rewards of our choices in life and a lot more. It’s not an easy movie to sum up and I don’t think the marketing label that it’s being given as a ‘psychological thriller’ is close to accurate, though there is a decided uneasiness that permeates the sunny, lavish world these characters inhabit. Whether audiences will take this difficult work to their hearts is easy to answer—they won’t—but neither will audience members who give themselves over to The Dying Gaul be likely to soon forget it. I know I won’t.
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This year’s Jude Law, Jake Gyllenhaal, so badly miscast in the recent Proof, now arrives as the troubled 20-year-old Marine in Jarhead. It’s a much better role for the charismatic actor and in Sam Mendes’ adaptation of Anthony Swofford’s Gulf War memoir, Gyllenhaal easily fills the leading man shoes. He is joined onscreen by Peter Sarsgaard (in his fifth film appearance this year), Jamie Foxx and a host of young actors who play members of Gyllenhaal’s unit.
At first the movie is interchangeable with many other film depictions of innocent ‘soft’ civilian men turned into toughened soldiers. There are the usual assortment of fellow trainee soldiers along with our naive hero: the strong silent man of steel (Sarsgaard), the brash, cocky braggart, the bookish (perhaps closeted) quiet nerd, the brutish southern big mouth and the tough but humane commanding officer (Foxx). And, of course, the usual assortment of fag jokes and gay innuendos—this being the American military. But here and there Mendes offers an interesting scene with a twist—like the one in which the young Marines watch the helicopter/Valkyries scene from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and get more and more riled up as the violence on the screen progresses. It’s like one of those calculated ‘Hates’ from Orwell’s ‘1984.’
When the troops are sent to Iraq, however, the film moves into much darker territory. The Marines are ready for action—they’ve been trained to kill but instead of going into battle they wait and wait and wait until the boredom, the heat, the unreality of their situation begins to take its psychological toll. When at last they approach the oil fields they’ve been assigned to guard, Mendes shows us what literally must have been hell on earth. In one disturbing scene Gyllenhaal encounters a lone horse covered in oil, slowly limping along as if in a daze. How could anyone ever return to civilian life and not be haunted for the rest of their life by such encounters? Jarhead vividly demonstrates that even in a war where no one shoots their weapon or once encounters the enemy, they can’t.