By Matt Soergel
Florida Times-Union

Philip Kaufman's Quills supplies us with a marquis toned down for popular consumption. (You will not discover here that he thought an aristocrat like himself had the right to commit murder in search of pleasure.) This marquis stands not so much for sexual license as for freedom of artistic expression, and after he is locked up in an asylum and forbidden to write he perseveres anyway, using his clothing, his skin and the walls of his cell as surfaces, and his own blood and excrement in place of ink. A merciful deity would have supplied him with writer's block.

Mr. Kaufman's film, based on a play by Doug Wright, mostly takes place after the marquis (Geoffrey Rush) has once again gone too far, after the excesses of his writing and his life have exhausted the license and privilege granted to aristocracy. In 1801, at 61, after 27 years spent in various prisons, he is sealed up in the insane asylum at Charenton. There he finds a sympathetic friend in Father Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix), a priest who thinks he should continue to write, perhaps to purge himself of his noxious fantasies.

The manuscripts are smuggled out of the asylum by Madeleine (Kate Winslet) and find a covert circulation before Napoleon assigns an administrator named Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) to crack down. The new man's sadistic measures bring out the best in de Sade, who mocks him, taunts him, outsmarts him and remains indomitable almost to the moment of his death.

Quills is not without humor in its telling of the horrendous last years of de Sade's life. There is, for example, the good cheer of Ms. Winslet's jolly, buxom laundry maid, who smuggles the manuscripts out of the prison. Father Coulmier is clearly stirred by her, but does not act, and we have the incongruity of the young, handsome man forbidden by religion from pursuing fruits that fall into the hands of the scabrous old letch.

Geoffrey Rush (the pianist from Shine) is a curious choice for de Sade; we might have imagined Willem Dafoe or Christopher Walken in the role, but Mr. Kaufman chooses not an actor associated with the bizarre but one associated with madness. De Sade is in the grasp of fixed ideas that sweep all sanity aside; unable to realize his fantasies in the asylum, he creates them through the written word, like a salesman or missionary determined to share his enthusiasm whether or not the world desires it. By the end, the words de Sade writes are indistinguishable, emotionally, from the pain he endures and invites by writing them.

De Sade has been described as the ultimate extension of the libertarian ideal, but that is lunacy: He goes beyond ideology to madness. Still, he stands as an extreme illustration of the idea that society is best served if everybody behaves according to his own self-interests. And he gets the last laugh: In the face of Father Coulmier's liberal instinct to sympathize and Royer-Collard's conservative attempt to restrain, the marquis remains indomitably himself. It is in his nature. The message of Quills is perhaps that we are all expressions of our natures, and to live most successfully we must understand that.