Playwright and screenwriter Craig Lucas makes his first venture into film directing with an adaptation of his stageplay The Dying Gaul, and ought to have known that audiences get lost when plot tics and cinematic tricks grow too many. Furthermore, moviegoers like things explained at least somewhat, but this film veers in the opposite direction, from name-dropping Tinseltown satire-exposé to more-than-meets-the-eye and finally into the self-defeat of conflicting, muddied actions and reprisals.

For maybe half its hour-and-three-quarters the tale neatly balances an unusually aware and intelligent Hollywood power couple and their befriended protégé, a suddenly bankable screenwriter whose partner has just died of AIDS complications and who may be mentally unstable and less noble of soul than his dedicated caring for that partner would indicate. Singly or in various combinations, the three are always center-screen, intentionally or not distanced from studio cliché, from each other, and from the viewer, by high-definition video that resembles Pathé-Color, singling out golds, whites, reds and blues in a pixilated effect as though through fine wide-mesh veils. An eclectic classical and contemporary soundtrack, instrumental and choral, helps keep the viewer off-balance, as moods and directions change, abruptly and often.

What defeats the effort, however, is its failure to come to grips with why? It is 1995, and powerful studio executive Jeffrey (Campbell Scott, who persuaded his friend Lucas to try his hand at directing), his ex-screenwriter wife Elaine, or “E” (Patricia Clarkson), and previously failed West Hollywood scriptwriter Robert Sandrich (Peter Sarsgaard), are attractive and attracted to one another, for psychological as well as physical reasons.

Trouble is, these reasons mutate, shift, become impossibly complex -- business? sex? admiration? kinkiness? outrageous revenge? -- but are not resolved. In the end, there is no definable motivation, and while life may be like that, art is not. Sympathetic in her own right and as wife and mother -- the two vague children are introduced for this sole purpose -- Elaine enters a situation and sets it up into another, then with no true evident motive at that moment confronts Jeff for his participation in it, demands that they talk later at 6:30 but never does so. Clarification of emotions behind printed words is avoided in that much of her involvement is via MenOnAParkBench -- a lamentable current film ploy -- to D.G. Bottom, Robert’s easily figured out chat-room screen name. As “male” ArckAngell 1966, she more than intimates to the vulnerable New Age Buddhist screenwriter that she is his recently deceased companion, which in turn revives all sorts of conflicting feelings.

Jeffrey loves his family but convinces himself that he is bisexual, as proved by an immediate, passionate affair with bearded Robert, who suspects that the other’s attentions mask a cynical desire to control his script, particularly to have him agree, for box-office, to change the 1172 references to the E.M. Forsterian “Maurice” to “Maggie, a woman with AIDS,” thus converting the relationship to a hetero- rather than homosexual one. Robert loves in his way his ex-wife and young son -- indeed, like Michael Douglas’ “D-FENS” of Falling Down, wants insurance money for them -- but as with his increasing flashes or visions, they, too, remain shadowy background.

Aside from monitor-screen messaging, what stays in the visual foreground is the couple's equally sterile Lalaland residence, a Tati-esque steel, glass and concrete affair with ocean views, open stairs and ramps, a pool, and poison lurking in its garden. Just as its title, derived from a Capitoline Musuem third century BC statue, is perfunctorily explained but not truly related, the film lingers at too great a remove. It circles, it feints and hints but, not catching the heart of the matter, neither pleasing nor appalling, does not epitomize its own Melville epigraph. 

(Released by Holedigger Films and rated "R" for strong sexual content and language.)