At age 68, Michael Douglas has been in something like fifty movies since he decided to go into the family business. Dad—the one and only Kirk, of course, still with us but long since retired—was either one of the greatest bad actors or one of the hammiest good ones in Hollywood history, two extremes his most famous son has steered clear of. Astute if not downright cautious about the limits of his range, Michael has never trafficked in the bravado that made Kirk's zesty ambitions the "Get a load of me" subtext of every movie he ever starred in.
Up to now, the big exception, flamboyance-wise, has been Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's 1987 Wall Street. But that was hardly because Douglas was playing against type. Since he's an uncommonly shrewd movie producer as well as a star, his sneakily sympathetic understanding of how big-league operators like Gekko justify their behavior most likely originated in his shaving mirror.
And the point, if you're wondering, is that wonders never cease. I don't think I've ever seen an actor of Douglas's age and repute embrace a part so alien to everything we expect from him at the level of HB0's _Behind The Candelabra, _in which he plays Liberace. In case you don't know—and frankly, there is no good reason why you should—Wladziu Valentino Liberace (1919-1987) once occupied the biggest, gaudiest closet to which Middle Americans visiting Las Vegas denied having the key. Despite being so obviously not Mr. Hetero that he'd make John Waters look like Dwight D. Eisenhower, he was a huge star from the 1950s through the '70s, mostly thanks to his florid ability to make every piano style ever invented sound like instant kitsch.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh—who, believe it or not in this day and age, ended up going to HBO after every studio in Hollywood told him the material was "too gay"—_Behind The Candelabra _is based on a memoir by Liberace's ex-lover, Scott Thorson, who earned his footnote in history by starring in the first-ever gay palimony suit. Matt Damon plays Thorson, and he's not bad at all. Despite being much too old for the part—the real Thorson was all of 18 when he encountered "Lee's" world—and too obviously brainy to be anyone's boy toy, he's still convincingly an object of desire.
Then again, one proof of Damon's intelligence is that he obviously knows this is his co-star's movie. You might think it's impossible to overplay Liberace, but Douglas takes care to keep his preening—sometimes an indulgence, but sometimes a stratagem—only one of the man's dimensions. He's a pre-Stonewall dinosaur and a total creature of showbiz, but he's also a veteran shrewdie. Knowing exactly what money and fame can buy him in his personal relationships, he doesn't kid himself he's doing anything but.
Perfectly aware—amusedly so, even—that the life he's created for himself is an artificial construct, he revels in that, too. Whenever his eyes show a moment of unguarded feeling, his cheesy smile turns it right back into part of his act, which is how he prefers to express himself anyway. Douglas plainly even relishes psyching us out in the movie's sex scenes, not so much because we know he's straight in real life as because he's got no vanity about his sagging pecs and senior-cit belly.
It hardly matters that the rest of the movie doesn't really deserve him. Soderbergh's one stroke of genius was to recognize that Douglas could and should play Liberace. Otherwise, its sexual frankness aside, _Behind The Candelabra _is a very conventional TV movie, hitting the obvious notes in the obvious sequence and rarely going off on interesting digressions. One exception is Rob Lowe's fey cameo as a plastic surgeon who doesn't bat an eye at Liberace's request to not only rejuvenate him but recarve Thorson's face to make him resemble Lee.
The formalist in Soderbergh may have led him to treat "Now I'm doing a TV movie" as one more impersonal genre ercise. The way the otherwise smooth photography gets a case of the jiggles to indicate that Liberace's boy toy is freaking out makes more sense as parody than anything else. That's just a guess, though, because the director's attitude toward the material is as unreadable as usual.
The difference is that, coaching Julia Roberts to a Best Actress Oscar in _Erin Brockovich _aside, he's never before directed a movie that's been such a showcase for a single actor's performance. Douglas makes Liberace so unsentimentally complex—at once more mysterious, more understandable, and more simply worthy of brainy people's attention than anyone ever thought the original was—that the mawkish finale feels almost like a sell-out disguised as an apotheosis. You wince a little for Damon's sake at the radiant forgiveness he's got to project, since that not only sentimentalizes Thorson as well but distorts him into the audience's stand-in.
But Douglas wins out even over that. If he's in any shape to tune in, the great Kirk—who once earned John Wayne's scorn for playing a "weak queer" like Vincent Van Gogh in Vincente Minnelli's _Lust For Life, _the boldest performance of the elder Douglas's unsubtle career—might be forgiven for thinking that he never knew the kid had it in him.