Tuesday, May 28, 2013

The Boy In The Sequined Bubble

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I don't know if there will be a shot in any movie out this year that I'll find as amazing as I do that shot of Michael Douglas in an enormous  fur coat popping his head up from behind a black-lit glory hole. Amazing!

I know Steven Soderbergh's movies often get criticized for being clinical or experimental over seeming, say, heartfelt - it's never been something that's bugged me too much because I'm almost always riveted by Soderbergh's experimentation. And so it goes with Behind the Candelabra, which I think covers up his heavy-duty intentions pretty well, so it was only after the fact that I realized what a revolutionary tack he was maybe making here. 

See, it's entirely possible that your impression of Liberace and All Liberace Stood For before this movie was different than mine, but he was to me the symbol of Sexless Homosexual Flamboyance. The queeny eunuch that all the little old ladies could swoon over without being afraid of his actual private parts coming into the equation - between them and his jewels of the human sort were an impenetrable layer of the flashy jewels of the diamond and ruby sort, plus sequins, and furs and capes and feathers and poodles and caftans and baby grand pianos and so on. People were able to famously pretend that he wasn't gay because nobody had any trouble pretending that he might not have sex, period. 

What I found revolutionary about Behind the Candelabra then is it, from its very beginning, makes such a point of view persona non grata - the very possibility of Liberace being sexless is well beyond its quite fruitful imagination. He is, from the start, presented to us as a pretty standard issue human being. Yes, the over the top excess is all around him, but I never felt like the movie was staring at that surface for too long. Soderbergh does this through all sorts of movie trickery, but think of the scene where we're introduced to Lee (Michael Douglas, doing great work) - a lesser film-maker would've given us the scene we get at the very end, of him desecdning from the heavens in an explosion of glitter-bombs and diamonds. But Soderbergh doesn't even focus on Liberace up there at the piano as we walk into that auditorium - it's only once that siren song of his magnificent piano playing comes into focus from the din that the camera find him, and slowly at that.

Time and again Soderbergh undercuts Liberace's excess by focusing on the man underneath the sparkle - oh it's there and the film's about it being there, tingling on the sidelines, but Soderbergh never feels the need to rub our noses in it and exhaust us with empty flash and glamour. You might actually have an argument that Soderbergh's a little too keen on stripping Liberace of all his exuberant showmanship - once the hair-piece comes off and Douglas stands there looking old and flabby and near next to godawful, you really kind of want to look away.

But it seems the point of Soderbergh's madness to me there too. He's intent on showing us not just how horny this purported eunuch was - he's clearly devoted to flipping the whole thing, the entire concept of that stereotype, on its well-past-its-experation-date head. Lee is bald and old and tacky and shrill and manipulative and creepy and all that jazz, but he is getting way more laid then you are, dude. 

But it's not just the sex, although that's shown as matter-of-fact as any of the other stuff; even there there's more of a focus on the post-coital conversations that any ol' couple has. Soderbergh seems most intent, without throwing up any big spotlights or alarm bells, on normalizing homosexuality itself, and he does that by zooming straight out to the furthest reaches of stereotype and straining for the banal amongst the golden slippers and snarling houseboys. He takes on the standard bearer most holy saint of All Things Super Queeny, and he shows us without underlining it at all how different his life would have been if he'd been able to, well, to get married, or at least not have to live a constant lie. The absence of sense a legitimacy for any of his relationships snarled up the works. That seemed to me the elephant in the room, spoken of only briefly, but pointedly, towards the end - and by its absence, a vacuum. A vacuum that got filled with diamonds, diamonds, DIAMONDS!
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1 comment:

John said...

I have to say I am curious about the movie, I'll see it when Netflix carries it. JA, wouldn't you say that Richard Simmons, Johnny Mathis and Barry Manilow fall into that category also. I mean Richard Simmons is pretty obvious but nobody really talks about it, or him. Could you imagine if Liberace was alive today with the Internet and cell phones...