Behind the Candelabra - film review

Matt Damon and Michael Douglas are both on fearlessly top form in roles you would never guess they could pull off in Steven Soderbergh latest film about Liberace's relationship with show-dog trainer Scott Thorson
Behind the Candelabra Cinemas nationwide, from Jun 7 Matt Damon and Michael Douglas star in Steven Soderbergh latest film about Liberace's relationship with show-dog trainer Scott Thorson. Read our critic's review of the Liberace bipic here. hbo.com/behind-the-candelabra
©HBO Films./Supplied by LMK
12 June 2013

Would that all television-made movies were as good as HBO's story of Liberace. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, it focuses on the six-year relationship between show-dog trainer Scott Thorson and the megastar pianist, darling of millions of nice ladies across the world who refused to believe he was gay.

It helps, of course, to have Matt Damon as Thorson and Michael Douglas as Liberace, both on fearlessly top form in roles you would never guess they could pull off.

It also helps to have a literate screenplay, culled from Thorson’s own book, by Richard LaGravenese. This showers the film with witty and sometimes scabrous one-liners but generally treats the relationship with respect, following it from the first come-hither wink in 1977 through the inevitable break to the deathbed reconciliation in 1987.

Soderbergh resists all parody in tracing the sometimes ludicrous excesses of the ageing Liberace, who demanded that his boyfriend had plastic surgery in order to look like him and expected him to put up with his roving, raging sexual appetite for other cute young men. Soderbergh records all this and neither admires nor damns the man.

Douglas is respectful, too, portraying his subject flagrantly, as he must, but never with tongue in cheek. He avoids over-playing and suggests that Liberace’s folksy charm was not entirely a showbiz gimmick. He presents a complex man capable of great generosity as well as an innate spitefulness when crossed.

This is really Thorson’s story, however, the eventually wronged party who regressed into a once-fussed-over but discarded lover determined to gain his just deserts. Damon’s fine performance is the linchpin of the film and gives it its essential humanity. Here is a young man pushed into such luxury as the great love of Liberace’s life that to be suddenly stripped of it must have seemed like the end of the world.

An almost unrecognisable Debbie Reynolds as Liberace’s mother and Rob Lowe as a slimy-faced doctor are also notable. The all-important production values of the HBO film, sadly adjudged to be “too gay” for cinematic release in America, are its second trump card after the performances. And here Liberace’s penchant for palatial kitsch is given full sway.

The outrageous costumes, the pianos decked out like sentient beings, the absurd stage baubles are all there, carefully copied from the originals.

Does the television budget give the film away? Not really, though this is a conventionally moulded showbiz biography with only one black-and-white flashback and a fantasy funeral sequence to suggest cinematic ambition.

Perhaps Behind the Candelabra lacks depth of focus but nobody could complain of any lack of pure, unadulterated entertainment value.

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