Right, it’s the International Film Festival season, meaning there are more than the usual number of films on my weekly agenda.
The first one was a “biggie”, in that it was featured at the front of the movie guide and was bound to be a big draw card, being the last Soderberg film and featuring Michael Douglas, Matt Damon and a whole raft of well know actors.
Behind the Candelabra is the story of one of Las Vegas piano player and showman Liberace’s longest lasting lovers. Damon plays the hunky Scott Thorson, who is nice but perhaps as dim as Damon’s puppet alter ego in Team America: World Police, while Douglas plays the creepy and controlling Liberace in an incredibly likeable way.
The story is told from Thorson’s point of view (later we learned it was from his memoirs) and so the portrait of Liberace and of Thorson himself doesn’t always seem terribly consistent. True, Liberace appears an incredibly controlling, narcissistic person, but why did Thorson choose to stay with him in the first place if he had no feelings for him, and in fact was a little repulsed by him? Was he really completely naive about his financial situation? And was Thorson’s drug taking accurately portrayed, or did Liberace really have good reason to get upset with him?
The questions though are for after the film. During it, there is plenty to enjoy: from the lavish décor of the Las Vegas residences, to the incredibly overt overtures by the serving staff, to Rob Lowe’s completely scene-stealing turn as a dodgy plastic surgeon who has taken far too much of his own particular brand of medicine, to a cameo by Mad About You’s Paul Reiser as a defeatist lawyer (do lawyers really cave like that in Los Angeles?), to Dan Akroyd’s quiet turn as Liberace’s long suffering manager.
From the list above, you can tell that there are almost no female characters at all in this story. Not that they would have any room to shine amongst all that star wattage. There is plenty of period costuming though, with Scott Bakula rocking a mean cravat in the style of Fred from Scooby Doo, and the feathered hair and glittering stage suits add an outrageously gaudy style to the whole thing.
Overall then, the film is a bit on the long side, but always entertaining in one way or another. Some strange camera effects are meant to add to the “drug” aspects of the film but just make it harder to tell what is going on, but despite that, the whole production is (mostly) elegantly and masterfully put together, and it is mesmerising to watch Douglas manipulate and cajole and and reassure one minute and then totally mess it up and be a complete b@sta@rd the next.
Being a “premiere” movie at the Embassy Cinema, I was not surprised to see the theatre almost completely sold out and to hear a smattering of applause at the end to the movie gods who might be paying attention (as no one who helped make the film was there). It is always an incredible experience to go to a film like that with a big audience (who seemed a lot more like members of the art intelligentsia than myself), and it really was the perfect way to start the filmfest season.
Verdict: Incredible turns from Douglas and Lowe, an Matt Damon in various physical states, add extra reasons to watch Soderberg’s Behind the Candelabra, besides the fact it is (in theory) the final Soderberg big screen production. It seems a smaller, more intimate movie that I would have thought (considering Liberace was Mr Showbusiness), but then his Las Vegas venues weren’t that big and it appears he tried to stay out of the big partying scene. It also seemed to be a rather… skewed version of events, but then as Liberace famously denied that he was gay, there is perhaps no way to really get a picture of how he saw his life, and Thorson’s telling may be as close as we will get to the glittering reality. 8 candles out of 10, mainly thanks to Rob Lowe.
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