Soderbergh's stylish kitsch bauble: decor wins out over emotion This isn't the first dramatization of Liberace's five-year relationship with Scott Thorson, the entertainer's 17-year-old boyfriend, 40 years his junior, taken on in 1976. But Steven Soderbergh's film, presented in competition at Cannes and shown in the US on HBO, surely is a stylish piece of work. What is it best at, though? Is it the depiction of a both strange and warped and touching and sad May-December gay romance between two lonely, needy people? Or is it the novelty casting and acting -- Matt Damon, Michael Douglas, and Rob Lowe as Scott, "Lee," and the memorably strange-looking plastic surgeon who worked on them and turned the young man into a drug addict with a lethal cocktail of cocaine, quaaludes, biphetamines, and Demerol? There's also Debbie Reynolds, who back in the day was entertained by the Scott-Lee couple, playing Liberace's bored and neglected mom, speaking with a heavy Polish accent. Aside from Damon's being 25 years too old, which makeup does wonders to conceal in the superior first half, the two leads turn in fine, sometimes astonishing performances as the kindly tyrant and his passive, later petulant, peroxide-blond victim.
But they can act their head off. It's still the mise-en-scene that will be most remembered: the achieved mimicry of LIberace's world, the gilded camp of the costumes he wore and decor he surrounded himself with. One is safest praising Soderbergh's restaging of several of the legendary shows, with the mile-long white fur robes, bejeweled Rolls Royces, the piano playing almost irrelevant. And also the sub rosa accoutrements of Liberace's life, such as the outrageous aforementioned cosmetic surgery, the amyl nitrite "poppers" to enhance orgasm (Scott doesn't care for them), or Lee's risky secret trips to porn parlors where Soctt, played by an angelic and hunky Matt Damon early on, who after plastic surgery and the drugs looks increasingly bruised and battered, vomits, presumably from the drugs.
Rather than a fine film this is an impressive novelty bauble, worth inclusion on the CV of everyone involved, most notably production designer Howard Cummings, so it's a pity its made-for-TV status (doubtless allowing for the sexual frankness) seems to bar it from Oscar consideration in any category.
The flashy, kitsch pianist Liberace was at some points the world's highest paid entertainer from the Fifties through the Seventies. His tasteless pastiches didn't win any favor with classical music critics, to whom he replied he was "laughing all the way to the bank." With his flashy incrusted luxury cars, mile-long white fur capes and gilded candelabra he is as garish as any world-famous entertainer could get. Now the question arises: How could anyone not know he was gay? Simply because Liberace rose to fame at a time when homosexuality wasn't a comfortable thing to talk about, and his naive middle-aged, middle-American female fans didn't want to know. Hence it makes a kind of now out-of-date sense that the pianist successfully sued people who linked his name with homosexuality, despite his flamboyant nelly demeanor and his cavorting with a pretty young man dressed up in matching glittery white outfits. Gays knew, of course, as is shown in the opening scene, when Scott is first taken to a Liberace show with an older man who knows the performer. And when they go backstage Scott is entranced and Liberace is interested and they both know it's not just about would-be veterinarian Scott bringing something for Lee's aging poodle's blindness.
Personally I baulk at taking the Scott Thorson-Liberace affair as revelatory of any inner secrets of human behavior or the human psyche. It just seems like a transaction convenient to both parties. I find such relationships singularly depressing, despite the balance of Richard LaGravenese 's screenplay from Thorson's memoir, and felt much the same about the young-old and also rich-poor gay liaison depicted by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in his 1975
Fox and His Friends. Mike D'Angelo was right at Cannes when he said Soderbergh's film is basically just the story of a lover affair that flourished for a while and then burned out, and that the interest is the tragicomic reproduction of all the surrounding vulgar excess and getting it right down to the last rhinestone.
The director is known as an impressively quick study. And this is a case of having too facile gifts (see the
Oceans movies, which however aren't so intimate) and so it feels like Soderburgh whipped this movie out as a stunt, the first in a declared new life of not doing actual theatrical-release films any more. Correspondingly, there's a chilliness about the life depicted in this made-for-TV title that fits with the director's cold production. But you can't blame him for that. It could not be otherwise. Not that this is a gay thing. Man has a tendency to commodify his whores and mistresses and kept boys equally, bedecking them with finery and then, when the novelty wears off, sending them packing. This is what happens to Scott.
Behind the Chandelier, being made in 2013, can be, and is, up front about the anal intercourse and Lee's fight to play top as well as bottom. Scott, who sticks to top, insists he's bisexual, though his straight side isn't showing: he professes to find butt-fucking yucky, at least for him to be on the receiving end of it. The film also depicts a loving relationship in which Scott plays both toy boy and son. That's why Liberace creepily resorted to having his young lover-paid "friend" and on stage chauffeur surgically altered to look more like him. When things go bad, Scott sues for palimony, but doesn't do as well as he thinks he ought to. Five years later, Liberace calls him back for a visit. He's dying. Later it turns out it's from AIDS, and his attempt to cover that up is posthumously thwarted. The film doesn't show Scott's life since (he's been in and out of jail and remained on and off an addict).
Ma vie avec Liberace, 119 mins., the French title translating the memoir's subtitle,
My Life with Liberace, has an Allociné press rating (4.0) that shows the enthusiastic post-Cannnes reception in France. Ditto Stateside: May 26 US HBO TV release: Metacritic rating 82. The UGC Les Halles theater in Paris where it was screened for this review a month after its 18 Sept. 2013 release was packed.
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