Glitz on glitz. It would have been most Liberace-like had the TV premiere of Steven Soderbergh’s HBO production, the Liberace bio-pic “Behind the Candelabra,” been presaged by the announcement that star Michael Douglas had won the Best Actor Award at Cannes. (In fact, it was another Hollywood vet, Bruce Dern, who was garlanded for his performance in Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska.”)
Soderbergh has announced that “Behind the Candelabra” will be his last movie. True or not, Douglas’s intensely focused turn as the caped, sequined piano-player known as Mr. Showmanship caps a directorial career that has been increasingly about the nature of “performance” — not least Soderbergh’s own. If “Side Effects” was a ’90s Michael Douglas thriller without Michael Douglas, “Behind the Candelabra” is the acting vehicle that the star never had. It’s not just that, for the first time, Douglas is playing an historical character but, for the first time, he’s playing someone other than himself. Or is he? If nothing else, Douglas is putting on quite a show — not to mention one that Mr. Showmanship never could.
Playing the part of Scott Thorson, the innocent young stud whom Liberace seduces, reduces, and abandons, Matt Damon more than holds his own against the scene-devouring Douglas. Indeed, the two-hour movie comes perilously close to becoming a dull morality tale until love-sickness kicks in and Damon gets his performance going. There are a number of striking supporting players as well, notably Dan Aykroyd (the rumpled manager), Rob Lowe (the sleazy plastic surgeon), and, best of all, Debbie Reynolds (all but unrecognizable as Liberace’s Polish mother).
Douglas humanizes Liberace even as he becomes part of the Liberace myth. “Behind the Candelabra” opens with a blast of disco and ends with a vision of Lee, as his associates call him, ascending to (show biz) heaven, while singing “The Impossible Dream.” Although a child prodigy who paid his dues in nightclubs for some decades, Liberace was significantly a creature of TV. Soderbergh brilliantly alludes to this by having beady-eyed Douglas stare into the lens and remark, “I was the first person on TV to look right into the camera.” Like, he engaged.
Liberace’s first Los Angeles-based TV show went national after one year, in 1952, and was widely syndicated through the mid ’50s. As Davy Crockett was for tots and Elvis for teenagers, so Liberace was for middle-aged women. His effect was not so much a craze as an example of mass reverse gaydar. Lee’s fans were pleased to deny that their idol’s flaming, campy persona had anything to do with homosexuality. (For a ridiculously credulous account of Liberace’s fabricated private life, see “The Loves of Liberace,” the “authorized” 1956 paperback original written by Hollywood Reporter staffer Leo Guild available in entropic thrift stores everywhere.)
Directed in a style that might be described as naturalized Baz Luhrmann, with an attitude that occasionally recalls that of Mel Brooks, “Behind the Candelabra” takes place mainly in the outsized beds and bathtubs of Lee’s personal Versailles. I was disappointed not to see Liberace’s trademark piano-shaped swimming pool, although the frequent side trips to Las Vegas are fun. Liberace anticipated Elvis as the personification of Vegas — a town Soderbergh has adopted as his own personal playground in the tedious “Ocean’s 11” franchise. In the ’70s and ’80s, underground cartoonist Bill Griffith deployed Liberace the same way, sometimes as a foil for Zippy the Pinhead. But “Behind the Candelabra” is an essentially serious movie, not least in its meditation on the uses of denial and the representation of camp.
Not long after Lee’s death (of AIDS related causes in 1987), a professor of performance studies, Margaret Thompson Drewal, published a detailed analysis of Liberace’s Easter 1984 performance at Radio City Music Hall. “What happens when Camp performance is detached from its gay identity?” the professor wondered. Or put another way:
If gay signifying practices serve to critique dominant heterosexist and patriarchal ideology through inversion, parody, travesty, and the displacement of binary gender codes, then what happens when those practices are severed from their gay signifier and put into the service of the very patriarchal and heterosexist ideology of capitalism that Camp politics seeks to disrupt and contest.
The basic idea is that capitalism can absorb anything, humans will gladly wear blinders when it serves them, consumption can be a vicarious pleasure, and that it was Liberace’s particular genius to realize this. Drawing on both Karl Marx and Bram Stoker, Drewal presents the caped, mock aristocrat Liberace as a sort of vampire. “As a conspicuous consumer supreme, Liberace made it clear that he thrived on the earnings of his blue-collar audience… Count Dracula aglitter.” Soderbergh applies a similar notion to Liberace’s private life. The scenes of the plastic surgery that His Showmanship uses to maintain his youth and turn Scott into his clone are horrifyingly graphic. In one humorous bit, the newly lifted Lee can’t even close his eyes to sleep; in another subtext, one is encouraged to ponder whatever work Douglas has had on his face.
“I’ve done my part for motion pictures. I’ve stopped making them,” Liberace joked during the course of the 1984 Oscar ceremonies. Funny but not true. Although “Behind the Candelabra” may be Soderbergh’s swan song, it’s an uncanny resurrection of the creature that was Liberace.