FILMBehind The Candelabra
(15) 118mins
★★★★✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Beyond the sequins, the hypocrisy, the lies and the teeth, director Steven Soderbergh finds an unlikely tale of a very real relationship.
REVIEW
I visited the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas in the '90s, years after the main man had died of Aids in 1987. Amid the trinkets, sequins and pianos, statues and bling, two very nice ladies - volunteers or curators, I guessed - were at pains to point out how not gay Liberace was.
They had him pegged as an asexual mummy's boy who had never found the right woman, an image the pianist himself was at pains to project.
This film - brash, naughty, endearing - is the shameless antidote to the years of lies and cover-ups. Not only was Liberace gay but he was heavily sexualised, resorting to porn, peep shows and impromptu pleasure seeking.
The film is brimful of waspish one-liners, bitching and innuendo. But director Steven Soderbergh has done a remarkable job, digging through layers of fabulous fabrication to find two authentic human beings.
Liberace (Michael Douglas) met dull animal wrangler Scott Thorson (Matt Damon) back stage in 1977, eyeing him lasciviously through the apertures left by his plastic surgeon. There is wicked fun to be had as the grotesque lures the country boy to his whirlpool baths and turns him with opulence and charm till he's dizzy.
He wants to bed him, father him, re-build him in his own image and he does all three assisted by a coterie of hangers-on and some crude re-modelling of the boy's face to make this Ken fit for Liberace's Barbie dreamhouse.
Years pass and awe becomes familiarity. Scott turns to drugs. Liberace's test-drives newer models. Jealousy runs rampant.
What is special about Soderbergh's masterly mix of comedy and heartbreak is the reminder that, for all his fey ways, Liberace was a man of immense talent and kindness.
Easy to depict him as a cartoon or a buffoon. Easy to trace the decline of his relationship with Scott as the end of another vanity project. Easy to prod at the hypocrisy of their faux-lives and dismiss them as Hollywood fakes.
But their relationship was real, meaningful and, madly, considering the pomp and pretension of his lifestyle, recognisably down-to-earth.
From his hairless trysts in the tub to his dying days with Aids, Michael Douglas gives a rousing, heart-warming portrayal of the candelabra king of kitsch while muscular Matt Damon is deliciously befuddled and confused by his hedonist's cocktail.
A tranche of recognisable faces become '70s Mr Potato Heads - big moustaches, big glass, big hair. Rob Lowe's hyper-tanned, fixed grin plastic surgeon is a hoot.
The film ends, not on a low note, with Liberace flair which is a fitting tribute to Mr Showmanship.
"I love to give people a good time," he says. Soderbergh understands the sentiment thoroughly.
