Behind the Candelabra is Stephen Soderbergh’s film about Liberace, starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, and already you will have heard two things which, naturally, you will need me to confirm so you can move on with your life. These two things are:
1. It is fabulous.
2. The film was ultimately funded by the television channel HBO, as Hollywood declared it ‘too gay’.
I will now deal with both:
1. Yes. It is fabulous. No other word for it, unless that word is ‘glorious’.
2. True and, if I had the time, I would go to Hollywood and knock their heads together. Saying this film is ‘too gay’ is like saying Citizen Kane was ‘too newspapery’ or Brief Encounter ‘too trainy’, as it’s human stories that audiences are interested in, and this is as powerful and universal and moving a human story as any. End of lecture. Next week, we’ll be discussing mise-en-scène in early French cinema, or at least we would be if I knew the first thing about it
This isn’t a regular, birth-to-death biopic as such. Instead, Soderbergh and screenwriter Richard LaGravenese have, in the style of Peter Morgan, focused on a finite period in Liberace’s life: the five years he spent with one of his sexy younger boyfriends, Scott Thorson. And although the film is classically shaped — it charts the beginning, middle and end of a romance; journeys from giddy freshness and excitement to screaming fights — it is properly about love and, more than anything, feels as if it is, just as it also feels true.
Scott, played with a blond, hunky innocence by Matt Damon — at least initially; he will be like a wounded animal baring teeth by the end — is a boy who has been raised in foster homes, works as a dog handler on movie sets, and hopes to become a vet.
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