Film reveals tinsel and tarnish

By David Wiegand

Published 1:38 pm, Friday, May 24, 2013

Photo: Claudette Barius

Image 1of/2

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 2

This film image released by HBO shows Michael Douglas, left, as Liberace, and Matt Damon, as Scott Thorson in a scene from "Behind the Candelabra," premiering Sunday at 9 p.m. EDT on HBO. (AP Photo/HBO, Claudette Barius) less

This film image released by HBO shows Michael Douglas, left, as Liberace, and Matt Damon, as Scott Thorson in a scene from "Behind the Candelabra," premiering Sunday at 9 p.m. EDT on HBO. (AP Photo/HBO, ... more

Photo: Claudette Barius

Image 2 of 2

This film image released by HBO shows Michael Douglas, right, as Liberace, and Matt Damon, as Scott Thorson in a scene from "Behind the Candelabra," premiering Sunday at 9 p.m. EDT on HBO. (AP Photo/HBO, Claudette Barius) less

This film image released by HBO shows Michael Douglas, right, as Liberace, and Matt Damon, as Scott Thorson in a scene from "Behind the Candelabra," premiering Sunday at 9 p.m. EDT on HBO. (AP Photo/HBO, ... more

Photo: Claudette Barius

Film reveals tinsel and tarnish

1 / 2

Back to Gallery

"If they knew who we were, they'd have nothing to do with us," entertainer Liberace says in Steven Soderbergh's sleekly unsettling film "Behind the Candelabra."

Liberace, played with perfection by Michael Douglas in the HBO film airing Sunday, is talking about why he loves animals, but he could be talking just as easily about his millions of fans who, for most of the pianist's four-decade career, never knew who he really was because he was so good at distracting them from the truth.

Soderbergh's film focuses on the final 10 years of Liberace's life, including his five-year relationship with a young man named Scott Thorson (Matt Damon), whose memoir was the basis for the superb script by Richard LaGravenese.

Thorson met Liberace in 1977 and was soon hired as his companion. They shared a bed, many bubble baths and Liberace even managed to work Thorson into his act by outfitting him in a gleaming white chauffeur's uniform and having him drive his Roll Royce on stage.

More Information

★★★★ Review

"Behind the Candelabra"

When: 9 p.m. Sunday

Where: HBO

★★★★ Excellent ★★★ Good ★★ Fair ★ Poor

Thorson claimed the relationship ended because of Liberace's promiscuity and because of his own drug addiction. In 1982, he filed a palimony suit against Liberace, which was settled out of court for $95,000, but not before becoming media fodder that pretty much obviated Liberace's denial that he was gay. When Liberace died of AIDS in 1987, his family and lawyers made an unsuccessful attempt to hide the cause.

Liberace maintained the lie of his personal life for almost the entire span of his career by understanding that, as Thorson says in the film, "people see what they want to see."

Liberace was the first person on TV to look directly into the camera, he says at one point. It seems just a throw-away line, but it suggests how image-conscious Liberace was. He was skilled at manipulating what his fans saw and believed, largely by hiding his sexuality in plain sight.

"Too much of a good thing is wonderful," he purrs to his audience, swanning around the stage in a fur coat with the longest train in the world. The line was borrowed from another great image-manipulator, Mae West.

But who was the real Liberace? Soderbergh uses his relationship with Thorson to explore the reality of Liberace's life as well as its artificiality, yet there is no absolute "good guy" or "bad guy" in "Candelabra": This is a film about the complex mix of motive and emotion that goes into a relationship, but is here drastically refracted by the artificiality of the lives Liberace and Thorson construct for themselves.

Soderbergh shows us again and again how effective those constructs were, even for Thorson, who was willing to submit to plastic surgery to be made over in Liberace's image. At one point, Thorson is mistaken by a fan for Liberace's son, and he is clearly pleased by the error.

"Candelabra" features great performances by a cast dominated by veterans of old Hollywood. Douglas is astonishing. He doesn't limit himself to merely mimicking Liberace's nasal speaking voice — he fully inhabits the character with unshakable authenticity.

Damon is just as good, somehow convincing us that he's far younger than he is in real life and artfully keeping us guessing about Thorson's true motivation as he worms his way into Liberace's life. After Thorson's plastic surgery, Damon's face becomes a grotesquely immobile caricature of a Keebler elf, not so subtly emphasizing how much Thorson is trapped in an adopted identity.

Sporting an immovable pageboy haircut, Lowe all but hisses like a Botoxed reptile as the pill-pushing plastic surgeon, and Reynolds, Aykroyd and Bakula are all perfect in their roles as well.

Contributing as much to Soderbergh's vision are the film's design by Howard Cummings and costumes by Ellen Mirojnick. It's not just that these elements are unimpeachably representative of the late '70s and early '80's: It's that they are elaborately sequined, jeweled, plumed and gilded to mesmerize us, much as they mesmerized Liberace's fans for years.

In the first half of the film, the visuals encourage us to share Thorson's certainty that he's arrived in some kind of wonderful fantasyland. But as the drugs, sex, excess, debilitation and deceit take their toll, everything that once dazzled us now works as ironic counterpoint to the dissolution of the relationship.

There is an especially powerful moment, shot from afar late in the film, showing Liberace and Thorson in matching floor-length silver fur coats and lit by garish yellow street lights as they enter a seedy porn store in the middle of the night. They resemble two cartoon condors looking for prey.

Another scene evokes the famous mirror finale in Orson Welles' "The Lady From Shanghai." As their relationship crumbles, Liberace sends people, including Thorson's half-brother, to evict him from the home Liberace bought for him. The house itself is a hall of mirrors, every wall a reflective surface. On being told he has to go, Thorson rushes from the mirrored hallway and out of the house, only to run into Liberace's delegation again, like the reappearing images in the funhouse mirror in "Shanghai." He is trapped in reflective artificiality.

In very telling ways, the sets of "Candelabra," and specifically Liberace's various homes, suggest a museum, with so many objects meant to catch our eye while remaining out of reach and on permanent display, shiny and ever-sparkling.