All that glitters is not told Behind The Candelabra Before Elvis, before Elton John, Madonna and Lady Gaga, there was Liberace: virtuoso pianist, outrageous entertainer and flamboyant star of stage and television. How gay is too gay? Steven Soderbergh has said all the major studios rejected this film as "too gay," which makes you wonder how gay they were expecting a Liberace movie to be. Those studio executives may not remember him in his heyday, but he was pretty gay then, too. A man who comes on stage in a rhinestone-encrusted Rolls-Royce, wearing a $300,000 white fox-fur coat with a 4.5-metre train studded with Austrian crystal, would appear to be stepping outside the usual definitions of heterosexuality. On the other hand, Elvis wore expensive rhinestone costumes, too. It was Vegas, after all. To some extent, Liberace's extraordinarily popular and lucrative career rested on a pact with his audience. He knew we knew, and the more he flaunted it, the more we enjoyed the joke, but the words must not be spoken. Liberace sued anybody who suggested he was gay, and won. You have to marvel at how good his lawyer must have been. The Sun King in a toupee: Michael Douglas? Liberace is wonderful, not warm. The film is based on the book by Scott Thorson, who was 17 when he moved into Liberace's house in Las Vegas in 1977. They stayed together as lovers for five years, until the thrill was gone and Lee (as he liked to be called) replaced him with a younger man. The relationship then moved into showbiz-biopic heaven: drug addiction, recrimination, lawsuit and, finally, Liberace's death from an AIDS-related illness in 1987. It is surprising it has taken so long to make a film, although the studio reluctance tells us a lot about where they think the popular audience stands on the entertainment value of homosexuality. Behind the Candelabra was made only when HBO backed it for cable TV, where it escapes most of the strictures of American censorship. The first two screenings attracted 3.5 million viewers. It may be Soderbergh's last film, depending on whether he sticks to his decision to quit filmmaking. If it is, it stands as representative: it's more than sumptuous, like his Ocean's Eleven films (partially set in Vegas), witty and fluidly made, somewhat shocking, overly preoccupied with sexual aberration and rather cold. Soderbergh does not make love stories, so much as films about the impossibility of love, right since his first movie, Sex, Lies, and Videotape in 1989. His career began in heterosexual aberration and it ends here - for the time being - on the other side of the fence. The common theme is excess and Soderbergh's dark view of the American dream of endless consumption. That's the subtext here, and perhaps part of the reason for using Michael Douglas. Greed is not good, after all. This absence of true love is a weakness in the film, which is otherwise entertaining. Scriptwriter Richard LaGravenese says it was always intended to be a love story, even if it ended badly. There is enough affection onscreen between Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as Thorson to make that intention clear, but less generosity on the part of Soderbergh. Douglas' performance is wonderful, just not warm. His Liberace is like the Sun King in a toupee, Mad King Ludwig with a spa bath and five lapdogs. Douglas doesn't quite mince, but he leers and licks his lips at the sight of Damon in swimmers. Thorson's statement that he is really bisexual plays as a minor detail for Lee. How long will this orphan kid be able to resist all that Lee can give him? Soderbergh doesn't let all this become derisory, but nor does he want to lose his sense of ironic detachment and humour. He's looking for a fine balance between satire and sentimental attachment. Soderbergh prefers to remain hip, outside the relationship rather than inside, which is where he would need to be to make a film about love, not money. Liberace was, ultimately, a circus act, and a self-made one. Behind the trademark candelabra on the piano was a darker personality, a man bent out of shape by his own desires. The scene where he asks his pet plastic surgeon, Dr Startz (Rob Lowe in hilarious form), to remake Thorson as he, Liberace, looked 40 years earlier, is played for laughs but it is also hauntingly creepy. Thorson agreed to the surgery because Liberace wanted "a son." It comes across in the film as a colossal camp joke. To make the love story would not have been that hard. The real Liberace was witty and extremely likeable on stage. Douglas doesn't quite give us that, so it is hard to see why women loved him - and some men. Soderbergh would have had to put himself down there in the audience to feel that, but he's never been of the people. That puts a brake on the film's emotional power, but it's quite intentional. Directed by Steven Soderbergh Rated M, 119 minutes