The recent film of The Dying Gaul is an interesting study of way Craig Lucas changes his material as he adapts his stage plays for the screen.

The story of the play and the movie concerns unsuccessful screenwriter Robert (the talented chameleon Peter Sarsgaard), who has just offered his latest script (also called The Dying Gaul) to producer Jeffrey (the always dangerous Campbell Scott). Robert's script comes from a very personal place; Jeffrey says that he loves the script—but could the genders of the leads be changed so that the relationship is hetero- rather than homosexual? Robert resists, but quietly agrees. Then Jeffrey, mindful of the powerful position he's in, makes a pass at Robert.

During the rewrite period, Robert comes to know Jeffrey's wife Elaine (Patricia Clarkson looking very toothsome) as well, and the three of them become interlocked in a suite of hidden relationships that are hidden and manipulating. The character of Maurice in Robert's script is based on Robert's lover Malcolm, who has died; Elaine uses that information in her own power play for the heart of Robert for reasons that are never clearly motivated. The resolution of this story leaves all three of them, Robert, Elaine, and Jeffrey, severely damaged, with no one having taken the moral high ground.

Craig Lucas himself acknowledges that this is a dark, crispy story, written quickly in reaction to personal suffering. And he has Robert admit that the point of "the dying Gaul" is "oblique." The Roman statue depicts a vanquished enemy warrior—imagine today a documentary detailing the deaths of Iraqi insurgents—Robert's screenplay suggests, "maybe... some kind of compassion was awakened in the Romans," and that perhaps other people would be spared.

The play, as published in book form, introduces a fourth character, Dr. Foss, who is Robert's therapist. In the film, Foss is a marginal presence, appearing in one brief scene. By cutting away at Foss's screen time, Lucas keeps the focus sharply on the triangle of Elaine, Jeffrey, and Robert. Yet in so doing, he omits to explain how it is that Elaine got access to Foss's case notes.

The film's setting is very precisely specified as 1995, and Vincent Jefferds's production design keeps us in that year: the cell phones are sleek but a little bit clunky; Jeffrey and Elaine's ocean-view home with rimless swimming pool is to die for. There's even a good attempt to render the GUIs of online applications from ten years ago, with their garish graphics. (Of course, no movie shot of a computer screen with words on it will ever look completely realistic, because the words have to be outsized so that we can read them.) And from our vantage point, we understand how instant messaging works and don't need to be told, so that bit of exposition in the playscript can be trimmed.

The proximate cause of Elaine's fate is more ambiguous in the published play than the movie. The film uses an image (a tourist snapshot of Robert visiting the statue "The Dying Gaul") under the closing credits to emphasize the point that Robert makes in a closing monologue in the play:

posted: 5:34:18 PM