-580.jpg)
If, as Steven Soderbergh has announced, “Behind the Candelabra” (which Emily Nussbaum reviews in the magazine this week) will be his last film before retirement (a retirement with an asterisk, because he has plans for a ten-hour TV series), it’s an apt project with which to bow out, because the movie reflects his revulsion for the entertainment industry. Its hero, Liberace, as portrayed (or, rather, channelled) by Michael Douglas, is a ludicrous figure, a talented pianist who plays drivel, whose stage persona exudes self-satisfied vanity, whose shtick is woefully corny, whose garish taste is painful to the eye, whose boasts of innovations (including the extraordinary notion of putting a candelabra on his piano) are trivial.
Soderbergh displays his idea of a heroic innovator in “Contagion” (a scientist whose research saves lives) and in “Side Effects” (a doctor who sacrifices all in search of knowledge). In “Magic Mike,” Soderbergh clearly delineates his view of the two sides of entertainment: there’s Mike’s world, in which the protagonist (Channing Tatum) finds that he has a knack for performance, devotes himself to it honestly and hard-workingly, but instrumentalizes it—and, when he has gotten out of it all he can, he quits and devotes himself to the modest craft of furniture-making. Conversely, there’s the world of Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), the fanatical impresario and dancer, a figure of ridicule but not quite of tragedy because of his self-deluding commitment to his art (or “art”) as his very raison d’être.
For Soderbergh, Liberace’s heroism isn’t in his actual performance but in his success; he delivered childishness to grownups, and—here’s the hard and heroic part—became rich and famous doing so. The hero’s difficulty is in imposing his will on the world, and Liberace did so. His innovation is his self-transformation from one skillful pianist among many to a living brand, someone who had to be seen if for no other reason than that so many others were seeing him.
Scott Thorson (Matt Damon) is, in “Behind the Candelabra,” one of the many who went to see him and was impressed. A young man and longtime foster child who works as an animal handler in the movie industry and plans to become a veterinarian, Thorson is taken by a friend to Liberace’s Las Vegas show and is brought backstage to meet the star, then gets to visit his home. The relationship grows through hints and glances but is sparked by Thorson’s offer of medicine for Liberace’s nearly blind poodle. The reticent young man is uncertain about wanting a sexual relationship with Liberace, but the elder man’s warmth, wisdom, wealth, and sincere affection—the sense of being (as Liberace says in one decisive scene) Thorson’s true family—proves decisive.
The subject of the movie is marriage that couldn’t speak its name or take its form, because a marriage is precisely the creation of a new family—which brings with it a range of legally defined rights and responsibilities. The relationship of Liberace and Thorson is seen foundering on the sort of obstacles that drive many married couples apart: unresolved sexual issues, the mere desire for novelty, the social dissatisfaction of seeing the same face every day, and the alienations of drug addiction. The two also have issues particular to a couple with a nearly forty-year age difference and unequal amounts of money, experience, and power. Marriage is an equalizer of sorts, and “Behind the Candelabra” dramatizes Thorson’s experience as a double dose of inequality—the inequality of his circumstances alongside Liberace’s being reinforced by the lack of protection afforded by the law.
When suing Liberace for palimony, Thorson tells his lawyer, “We were fucking married,” and the lawyer responds, “The law says you weren’t, and a contract for sex can’t be enforced.” It’s a line that resonates poignantly against Immanuel Kant’s famous definition of marriage as “the union of two persons of different sex for life-long reciprocal possession of their sexual faculties.” But, of course, marriage also has a Hegelian side—the reflection of the couple, of the new family, in the public realm—and the third inequality that Soderbergh spotlights is the public hostility to homosexuality that prevented the couple from making their relationship known (as reflected in the nondisclosure agreement that Thorson was forced to sign in his settlement with Liberace). The movie revisits a strangely recent time when public figures went to great lengths to conceal their homosexuality; it adds the suggestion that Thorson was also hiding from himself, claiming to be bisexual without (as Liberace notes sarcastically) actually having any relationships with women.
As a love story goes, “Behind the Candelabra” is opaque; as a vision of a marriage-like relationship, it’s a sort of black box. What brings Liberace and Thorson together is no mystery, or, rather, it’s the ultimate mystery; what drives them apart is nothing unusual. What’s exciting about the film is the unfolding of the utterly ordinary under the guise of the extraordinary. It’s tempting to see Thorson’s attraction to Liberace as the stereotypical seduction of money and celebrity, but I think that Soderbergh is after something subtler and truer: the alchemical spark that brings two people together enduringly, both because of and despite their differences of circumstances. Liberace may have been rich and famous, but Thorson was no gold-digger. The immense allure of Liberace’s personality and his practical worldliness, not just his musical artistry, made him rich and famous—and Thorson was won over by Liberace the man even as he admired Liberace the performer and—at least for a while—happily subordinated his own goals and interests to serving Liberace’s own.
But Liberace’s own goals were hopelessly banal, and he pursued them in conformity with the blandest expectations of his times, assuring his place in the entertainment industry precisely by ruthlessly denying his identity to the world—a world that, had he not done so, would doubtless have ostracized him, and whose standards he all too readily internalized. In one sadly comical scene, he prepares for his own appearance on the Oscars broadcast by praising Jane Fonda for giving up politics and asserting that entertainers exist to entertain, not to display their opinions. Beneath his talent, his style, and his practical vision, Liberace comes off as ordinary, even dull. Homosexuality may have made him different from the presumptive norm but it didn’t make him exceptional, and the tragedy of the film isn’t the seductive emptiness of the entertainment world or the imbalance in power between Thorson and Liberace—it’s the inability of the ordinariness of gay life to be lived out as ordinary.
That’s why—as in “Contagion,” where Laurence Fishburne plays a bureaucrat who steps up behind the scenes—the real hero of “Behind the Candelabra” is the unnamed Riverside County heath-department official who rejects the death certificate in which it’s claimed that Liberace died of cardiac arrest rather than of AIDS. In Soderbergh’s film, the mind-crushing dullness of Liberace’s performances is inseparable from the lifelong pressure on him to construct a public identity in radical contrast with his own desires. That’s the world of entertainment at its worst—the expression and reinforcement of prejudices so common as to pass unquestioned, of spectacles that, far from being absent of content, convey it all the more surreptitiously and potently.
In “Behind the Candelabra,” Soderbergh shows that mechanism at work in decades past, but how does it continue to work today, and how does a director overcome those tendencies? Through style alone? Soderbergh is one of the few great choreographers of the contemporary cinema; watching his actors move and his camera (which, under the pseudonym of Peter Andrews, he wields himself) follow them with swooping and gliding track and crane shots is one of the great joys of this film and his other recent works. But if the critique of a performer such as Liberace is that he failed to unify his public and private personae, that he remained hidden behind his act, then what good are such glorious figures of style? Is Soderbergh placing moral and practical demands on the cinema that he is unprepared to meet? In any case, his relationship to the cinema, and to the movie business, is complex and conflicted, and it’s also his very subject. The way that his art confronts the demands of commerce—and the personal price of that confrontation—seems to be at the heart of his ambivalent and tentative retirement plans, no less than of this temporarily valedictory film.
Photograph by Claudette Barius/HBO.
