The Dying Gaul

Written after a sour moviemaking experience with Prelude to a Kiss, Craig Lucas's 1998 play The Dying Gaul was a poison-pen letter to Hollywood and its ability to drain creative talent dry. Six years later, Lucas's directorial debut still comes off like a flipped bird to industry brass, particularly with its sharply satiric portraits of a closeted bisexual executive (Scott) and a brilliant gay writer (Sarsgaard), whose semiautobiographical script the studio suit wants to buy. Unfortunately, the film also duplicates the play's mélange of muddy moral quandaries and degenerates into discordant white noise.