Clever, clever, clever. Craig Lucas' THE DYING GAUL turns the thriller genre blithely on its head with this trio of awful people who have little more in common than a moving, autobiographical screenplay that will receive a complacent makeover, sophisticated hypocrisy, and the pretense of friendship masking hidden agendas. Robert Sandrich is at the center of this story -- a writer who has child support to pay and is in dire need of a hit. He's written this fantastic, beautiful, evocative story that is based on his own life experience: a love story between two men that ends in the death of one of them, titled "The Dying Gaul." Jeffrey Tishop is a movie producer, and is interested... with one simple condition: it needs changing. American audiences, he says, hate gays, and will not go to the theatres to see a movie about two gay men in love. (The movie is set in the mid-90s.) Now, if Robert changes the male character -- Maurice, also the name of Robert's agent and longtime lover who has died -- into a woman, it would be perfect. Robert, understandably, is horrified: he's being asked the unthinkable, and he has his heart in this story. Jeffrey sleekly tells him, he loves the story -- and he's even shown it to Gus Van Sant (who at the time was at his peak). However, the change is necessary.<br /><br />Robert bolts, but succumbs to one tiny little detail: one million dollars, payable to him immediately, to which he can after this one story do whatever he chooses to -- create stories of gay men left and right, ill or healthy. Robert is in a predicament... and he sells his soul.<br /><br />Enter Elaine. She's a former screenwriter herself, now living the life of comfort in her Los Angeles house overlooking the sea. Jeffrey introduces her to Robert first via his screenplay, which moves her to tears (as he is deleting all 1172 instances of Maurice and changing it to Maggie). She later meets him for a night out at the movies, and she and Robert have the kind of chat that happens when two women are sharing innermost secrets. Among them is the fact that he's into internet chat and goes to a specific room in a system not unlike AOL. Curious about him -- maybe a little too much so -- she follows him into this chat room using a male identity and uncovers a little bit about him. Of course, the anonymity of internet chat makes people talk more than they should, and a later conversation between Elaine and Robert reveals something crucial, possibly hinted all throughout her marriage, but there, in front of her, typed words on a monitor.<br /><br />Craig Lucas discloses himself as a great orchestrator of people approaching their own realities from an oblique path in his extremely well plotted out and near perfect story. His use of Steve Reich's music is stunning, and perfectly counterpoints the plot turns, as well as sounds per se -- like when Elaine discovers her husband's secret and a hose goes off, or the shrieks of the Tishop children at the beginning, bookended by something horrible at the end. If you can overlook the one point of the story where plausibility might be put into question -- the fact that Robert would be so gullible to answer an approach as naked as the one Elaine uses masquerading as "Sean" -- "Anyone here ever lost a lover?" -- then the rest of the story which follows is a careful construction of times suspense that doesn't swallow its conceit whole. Even so, the fulcrum here, online chat, holds itself well being that at the time there was this innocence about chat rooms. I would have to believe Robert had only recently taken it up after the pain of losing Maurice and his overwhelming loneliness, since he doesn't seem to have friends or a life outside his computer and fiction. Only then could it jell in a perfect seam. (Then again, anyone who's come into the Internet for the first time does so with a sense of novelty that only progressively, after much disappointment, loses its truthfulness.) Where the story somehow loses a little of its initial punch is when Elaine takes her online act further as "Arckangel1966". But, for there to be some form of suspense, it's probably the only way to convey this progressive bull-fight between her and Robert, and the presentation is certainly pitch-perfect in letting us see both actors talking directly to the camera and hear voice-overs of what they're typing, but also letting us hear her as her male counterpart -- in this case, Maurice himself. It's suspension of disbelief that pays off.<br /><br />Neither of the three characters come off naked to us. I think it's a good thing because it gives their words, their actions, and even small gestures a hint of duplicity and doesn't allow anyone to come off smelling like a rose. Jeffrey, for example, states he's shown the script to Van Sant, but his eyes indicate otherwise. His attraction to Robert may be sexual, but masks the greed of having your cake and eating it too. Robert is just creepy: not a bad guy, but a little off, not above betrayal and even murder. Elaine's motives are, while understandable, more unclear. Baiting Robert with information she gets access to through a private investigator is plain ugly. In a way, she's a new kind of femme fatale -- one that under the guise of an identity can be anyone. This is one deadly threesome.<br /><br />Craig Lucas' THE DYING GAUL is a complex film that despite some minor flaws stemming from its online conceit digs deep into the veneer of those who seem to have it all, and those who are trying to have it all. Patricia Clarkson, Campbell Scott, and Peter Sarsgaard are uniformly flawless in their characters and are reason enough to see this movie.