THERE'S A SOMETIMES mystifying disconnect between hype and quality at the Sundance Film Festival that each year sees certain films wildly overrated while others are almost completely ignored. This year, for instance, such good, but far from great, movies as 40 Shades of Blue and The Squid and the Whale grabbed major prizes denied the far richer Junebug. And The Dying Gaul, the first directorial feature by playwright-scenarist Craig Lucas (Longtime Companion, Prelude to a Kiss), was generally shrugged off as a misfire. Passed on by major-league distributors, it has ended up as perhaps the starriest and slickest US feature ever captured by ever-gay-subject-matter-friendly Strand Releasing. One worries the unappetizingly titled film may still be too thorny even for most gay audiences, let alone average art-house ones. It's not exactly a feel-good movie, allowing for the fact that seeing Campbell Scott and Peter Sarsgaard naked together and screwing can indeed feel pretty good. Sarsgaard plays Robert, an NYC writer flown to La La Land by studio executive Jeffrey (Scott), who wants his screenplay – one he'd written for the lover who recently died of AIDS and which Jeffrey's wife, Elaine (Patricia Clarkson), pronounces "perfect." Yet it is the way of Hollywood that perfection can always be improved on, or at least made more marketable; thus Jeffrey begins seducing Robert into creative compromises. He also seduces him in the more traditional fashion, even as oblivious cuckold Elaine takes a passionate, quasimaternal interest in the still-grieving author. When her good intentions get wire-crossed with the boys' misbehavior, this loaded triangle takes several perverse, eventually macabre turns. Adapted from his stage play, Lucas's script cuts sharp as a knife, recalling the terse psychological sadism of vintage Harold Pinter, albeit with more warmly rounded characters. The denouement, however, may be crueler than anything in Pinter's ouevre. Shamelessly schematic, effectively cinematic, and brilliantly performed by all three principals (especially Sarsgaard, pushing himself just shy of excess mannerism), The Dying Gaul is a striking gambit that will reward those who like their dramatic cocktails strong, with a bitter aftertaste. (Dennis Harvey)