The Life and Times

A movie biography (biopic) can be a wondrous thing. Or it can be little more than a TV soap opera, cardboard all the way.  Behind the Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh’s feature film swan song, despite having been in competition for the Palme D’Or at the Cannes film festival, falls into the soap opera type. The Palme D’Or, by the way, went to another film that deals with a same-sex relationship, Blue is the Warmest Color , and we hope that one lives up to its hype.

It is unfortunate that Steven Soderbergh didn’t do more with the rich material and actors he had. Above all the material; Behind the Candelabra is about the five-year relationship between the pearl and diamond-studded pianist Liberace and Scott Thorson.  Sounds simple enough, until you get “hints” from the movie about what some of the more complex issues at hand were that could have made for an amazing biopic. Scott Thorson was 16 when he met Liberace, he was already seeing older gay men (the one who introduced him to the pianist) and was living in foster homes. Liberace was extremely successful, a closeted gay man and 58 years old when he began this relationship with Scott.  Just up to there is a complex biopic: the millionaire, ultra eccentric entertainer –he walked around in a Norwegian blue shadow fox cape with a 16-foot-long train and rode in a mirrored Rolls-Royce-  with tremendous mommy issues, and the 16 year old gay foster boy. And right there Soderbergh goes at it wrong casting 43 year old Matt Damon to play the 16 year old in this relationship. Damon may have boyish good looks, and his acting is actually the best thing in the movie, but he does not begin to convey the strangeness in a sexual relationship between a 58 year old man and a 16 year old boy.

Matt Damon and Michael Douglas

But that’s not all the story in this relationship, the five years that Thorson lived with Liberace completely transformed the life -we could even dare to say destroyed- of this man who now, in his early fifties, is a recovering drug addict in jail. The pianist had Scott undergo plastic surgery so he would look like him and was drawing up papers to adopt this young man he was having sex with. It’s like a plot straight out of an Almodovar film (o.k., maybe a tad less that The Skin I Live in, but this is real life!).  It was going through this physical transformation that Thorson was also introduced into drugs by the plastic surgeon that worked for Liberace, played by an alien-looking Rob Lowe in this movie.

This entire plot is ho-hummly skimmed over in the film. Liberace, who was into all kinds of sex excesses, ultimately and pretty quickly grew tired of Thorson and discarded him. Thorson sued and settled. The 22 year old young man received $75,000 from a man whose fortune, by the 1970’s, was estimated at $115 million.

Liberace, played well enough by Michael Douglas, died of AIDS and did call Thorson back to his death bed. There is so little feeling in this movie, that even this scene is heartless. Did Liberace ever have regrets? The man who, when Thorson asks him how he feels after his mother dies, responds “free”, probably did not. Did Thorson? Most likely too many. Does Soderbergh?

It could have been a contender.

Biographies in movies can be fascinating, especially with such material to work from. The list of wondrous biopics is long. Martin Scorcese, one of my favorite directors, has excelled in them with movies like Raging Bull about the boxer Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro gained around 50 pounds to play La Motta), The Aviator, about Howard Huges or Goodfellas.  In fact, many biopics have been Oscar winners for the movie, the director or the actors: Steven Spielberg’s Shcindler’s List about Oscar Schindler, Richard Attenborough‘s Gandhi, both won Best Picture Academy Awards; Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, Gus Van Sant’s Milk about Harvey Milk, for which Sean Penn won the Academy Award, Bennett Miller’s Capote for which Philip Seymour-Hoffman won, Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot for which Daniel Day-Lewis got one of his…I  most certainly could go on. The point is made. The opportunity lost.