Screenwriter Craig Lucas, of Longtime Companion and Prelude to a Kiss, turns director as well, bringing to the screen his own stage play, a behind-the-scenes peek into the studios and boudoirs of Hollywood: the negotiations over a labor-of-love screenplay about the death from AIDS of the writer's lover (his dream director: "Gus Van Sant, I guess, since Truffaut is dead"), the producer's insistence that the central relationship of the script be heterosexualized ("Most Americans hate gay people"), the 1,172 reluctant replacements of "Maurice" by "Maggie" at a single keystroke on the computer, the ensuing affair between the writer and the bisexual married producer, and the dire consequences thereof. (None more dire than the ill-advised tableau vivant of the titular piece of sculpture at the fadeout.) The wife's discovery of the affair and her initial retaliation for it are rather patly facilitated in an Internet chat room by the name of Men on a Park Bench (or Menonaparkbench), where she manages to convince the still grieving writer that she is his departed lover communicating from the Other Side. More Prelude to a Kiss, you might say, than Longtime Companion. Altogether too much of an already stagy, static movie takes place in front of computer screens, or, as a stylized but uncinematic substitute, in front of talking heads reciting online chat. The plotting admittedly achieves a certain level of ingenuity if not a commensurate level of credibility, and it steers a course in a no-man's-land between the "serious" indie relationship film and the "generic" mainstream thriller. The cast of Peter Sarsgaard, Campbell Scott, and Patricia Clarkson sees to it that the course doesn't drift toward the mainstream. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd