NOCTURNAL ANIMALS 2016

Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review. Many crucial plot points are 

revealed and referenced for the purpose of analysis. 

Amy Adams as Susan Morrow

“Do you ever feel like your life has turned into something you never intended?”

Susan Morrow is a successful Los Angeles art gallery owner who lives a life of lacquered, heavily-curated wealth in the kind of sterile, fortress-like compound Architectural Digest tries to convince us are homes. They’re domiciles, they're dwellings, but by no stretch of the imagination are they homes. Susan, who sports— or, more accurately, hides behind— a severe, vision-concealing hairdo, shares this steel and cement mausoleum with her model-perfect financier husband, Hutton (who looks precisely like what you’d imagine a man named Hutton would look like), along with several million dollars’ worth of art. Art for which Susan harbors little affection and must occasionally sell in order to keep up appearances while her husband’s business flounders.

Armie Hammer as Hutton Morrow

From the way she occupies space without actually inhabiting it and dresses in a cold, off-putting style best described as "hostile chic," we can tell that Susan is at some kind of crossroads. Often caught in moments of lost-in-thought stillness, Susan exhibits all the traits of suffering from the kind of well-upholstered midlife crisis that arises after career and creature comforts are secured and the “Am I happy?” dilemma begins to rear its head. But there's something more. It has to do with her past...and it's tearing Susan apart. 

"What right do I have not to be happy? I have everything. 
I feel ungrateful not to be happy."

Jake Gyllenhaal as Edward Sheffield/Tony Hastings

Into this environment of costly ennui arrives a manuscript that turns out to be the proofs of a soon-to-be-published novel by Susan’s ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), an aspiring writer she hasn’t seen or been in contact with for 19 years. In fact, their breakup was so acrimonious and hurtful (she left after secretly aborting their child and cheating on him with the “handsome and dashing” Hutton) that Edward never remarried, and all attempts by Susan to contact him have been met with his hanging up on her. (Side note - I mourn that future generations will never know the ecstasy of slamming down a phone receiver in anger.)

Michael Shannon as Bobby Andes

If the timing and arrival of this parcel weren’t already fraught with portent—delivered, significantly, by a shadowy figure driving a vintage, chocolate brown Mercedes—then certainly Susan suffering a this-can’t-be-a-good-omen paper cut while opening the package sets off plenty of additional existential alarms. However, the novel’s title “Nocturnal Animals” (a onetime term of endearment Edward had for his chronically insomniatic ex-wife), its dedication (“For Susan”), and an uncharacteristically genial note crediting her with inspiring him hint, perhaps, at the possibility of one of those well-timed, estranged couple reconciliations beloved of rom-coms.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Ray Marcus

But when Hutton leaves for a business meeting (monkey business, if you get my cruder meaning), Susan settles down to read her ex-husband's novel, only to find it a disturbing, brutally savage tale of violence, guilt, loss, and revenge. One that Susan interprets through the meaningless absurdity of her current life and the fractured, self-reproachful emotional prism of her past with Edward. 

Within the novel's sad, heart-wrenching story of a family destroyed by a nighttime confrontation on a desolate stretch of West Texas Interstate, Susan sees troubling real-life parallels. The more she reads, the more she fears that the allusions and thinly-veiled similarities are an allegorical, perhaps menacing, indictment of her relationship with Edward and her culpability in its dissolution. 

Laura Linney as Anne Sutton

“Susan, enjoy the absurdity of our world. It’s a lot less painful. 

And believe me, our world is a LOT less painful than the real world.”

Nocturnal Animals, written and directed by Tom Ford (only his second film, his first being the sensitive and touching A Single Man), is one of my new modern classics: a contemporary film with the heart and soul of a film made in the '70s.
I don't often write about contemporary films, but when I do (Closer, Blue Jasmine, Maps to the Stars, and Carnage), it's when they speak to me in a forceful, intimate voice reminiscent of my favorite films from the '60s and '70s. They tend to be difficult, character-driven scenarios dealing with the pain of interpersonal conflict, self-confrontation, and alienation. They're movies that, for me, illuminate the vicissitudes of human experience in ways that are challenging and poignant. People will write to me, curious as to why I'm drawn to films of intense emotional turmoil...often between complicated characters who are not altogether wholly sympathetic.

I like to think it's because I'm fundamentally a happy person blessed with a modest, good life and peace of mind. Peace of mind I attribute to the lessons learned from having endured and grown from my share of challenges and difficult times. While I'm no advocate for hardship as life's greatest teaching tool, speaking subjectively, none of the happiness I value in my life would have been possible without the time spent grappling with at least some pain and sadness. Since I respect this aspect of life, it seems to be a quality I gravitate toward and applaud when I see it addressed in film.

I like being reminded that life--the good and bad of it--is a thing to be experienced, not something one seeks to cocoon and insulate oneself from in pursuit of the emotional sterility of the unexamined existance.

The characters in Edward's novel are Tony & Laura Hastings (Gyllenhaal and Isla Fischer)

 and their daughter India (Elle Bamber).

Nocturnal Animals is structured as three simultaneously told stories. Present-day reality has Susan reading her ex's novel; flashbacks reveal her relationship with her first husband; and the third narrative is Susan's visualization of her husband's novel. Although the book is a work of fiction and not revealed to be a roman a clef, Susan nevertheless envisions the characters as looking like herself, Edward, and the daughter that she had with her 2nd husband. 

This raises the notion that the violent action of the novel is a metaphorical commentary on the reality-based parts of the film, while calling into question the reliability of Susan's perspective. Is she interpreting the novel through the same prism of guilt and emotional violence she uses when reflecting on her regrets of the past? 

Susan only smiles openly in images from her past

I was absolutely floored when I saw Nocturnal Animals. No, check that...Nocturnal Animals was a kick in the solar plexus. I was stunned. Like a good thriller should, its plot kept me in a near-constant state of agitation and anxiety, but the tension didn't emanate from the storyline(s) alone -EVERYTHING about the film sparked my emotional antennae. 

From the considered use of costuming to reveal character, the edge-of-your-seat sound design, the evocative use of decor, the music (Abel Korzeniowski's score sent chills down my spine)...all of it was pure bliss for me. I love it when a movie can create an entire world onscreen, and in the world of Nocturnal Animals, so much is going on and so many messages are being communicated that a certain alert attentiveness is required.  I was thoroughly worn out by the time the film was over. Yet, I couldn't wait to see it again. 

Watching it was such a rich, exhilarating, disturbing, and equilibrium-losing roller coaster experience.

As much as it can be said of a director with only two films under his $800 belt (the actual cost of a Tom Ford belt, folks), Nocturnal Animals features these director "signatures" first on display in A Single Man (2009): 

Top - Colin Firth's character in A Single Man drives a vintage brown Mercedes-Benz. In Nocturnal Animals, a brown Mercedes is briefly glimpsed delivering the pivotal book manuscript (this is the only time the "real" Edward appears in the film). The same car is shown being driven by the fictional characters in Edward's novel.  

Center - Large-framed spectacles of the sort worn by Firth's character in A Single Man are worn by two characters in Nocturnal Animals. 

Bottom: A Single Man featured a protracted, comical scene with a character seated on a toilet. In Nocturnal Animals, Ray's unorthodox facilities are more unsettling than amusing.

Forget palm trees and beaches...THIS is Los Angeles

As a longtime L.A. resident, Nocturnal Animals offered me a provocative and figurative perspective on otherwise familiar surroundings. Having worked many years as a personal exercise trainer to wealthy clients, much of the privileged world and its inhabitants depicted in Nocturnal Animals is recognizable (albeit, from the outside looking in).

And "in" is the operative word here, for theirs is a world dominated by interiors. Moving from security-gated homes to their apartment-sized SUVs, they're driven to their laminated offices, work out in exclusive and sterile gyms before winding up the day at ostentatiously cloistered restaurants. The only time anyone spends outdoors is the length of time it takes to walk from one interior to the next. 

Nocturnal Animal's depiction of Los Angeles as a gray and blue landscape is quite apt; for who sees the sun when you're always wearing dark glasses and looking out at the world through the tinted windows of a limousine?

Zawe Ashton as Alex

The world Susan inhabits is a holed-up environment that offers many benefits (the illusion of safety, insulation from self-examination), but it also brings a unique set of problems. Problems that many wealthy individuals are conflicted about, due to the curious phenomenon that "having everything" very seldom, if ever, actually feels like it. Nobody has everything. That's a fact. But to have so much and still not feel fulfilled seems to eat the rich alive.

Jena Malone as Sage

The extreme (one might say, ridiculous), high-style fashion designs by Arianne Phillips play a significant role in establishing a sense of otherworldliness in Susan's surroundings and personal associations.

Andrea Riseborough and Michael Sheen
as socialite couple-of-convenience Alessia and Carlos

THE SUBJECTIVE GAZE
I have a weakness for films that play with the idea of perception. The subjective gaze and the possibly unreliable narrator fascinate me because when a film leaves it up to the viewer to draw their own conclusions based on the images presented, truly eye-opening things are revealed. Mostly about the viewer.
All three narratives in Nocturnal Animals (the present, the past, and the fictional) are viewed through Susan's perspective. Hers is the only reality we encounter. Whether it involves her reevaluation of the past, her sense of alienation in her current unhappy marriage and unfulfilling job, or her reaction to Edward's novel, our understanding of their reality relies solely on what we learn about Susan.

The subjectivity angle introduces many interesting points. For example, just because Susan feels guilty about her past doesn't mean she has sufficient cause. As a friend tells her, "You're awfully hard on yourself,"  and she is. In many ways, ALL the characters in Edward's novel convey some aspect of Susan's critically low self-regard. Nocturnal Animals is at its most intriguing when, on repeat viewings, one realizes how many people, objects, and circumstances from her life Susan has projected onto the events in Edward's novel. 

The Rich Fear the Poor/ The Poor Resent The Rich
The film's broad depiction of the redneck murderers (Karl Glusman as Lou) can be seen as Susan's amplification of a perceived the lack of safety in the world outside of the insulated, stainless steel gates of her interior decorated bunker 

Indeed, my own subjective gaze significantly influences why Nocturnal Animals affected me so strongly. Just a month before seeing it, a writer friend offered me the chance to read the pre-publication manuscript of her upcoming novel, telling me, “I think you’ll like it. You know these people.”

My friend is, independent of our knowing one another, one of my favorite authors, anyway; her books and short story collections never fail to engage me in their exploration of the complexity of human relationships. A compelling novelist of many books on varied topics, she most recently published a series of books for the Young Adult market. It was the expectation of revisiting the lighthearted tone of those novels that stayed foremost in my mind as I settled down with her manuscript.

I read the entire novel in two days, and nothing I knew about the woman or her previous work prepared me for this book. It was unexpectedly violent, emotionally heart-wrenching, and very sad; by the time I finished the last chapter, I was quite shaken and reduced to a crumpled heap of red eyes and a runny nose. The book left me both physically and emotionally drained. I was so startled that this brutally tense, suspenseful work came from the rather sweet, gentle-natured soul I knew. 

Jump ahead to late December, and I go to see Nocturnal Animals. Suffice it to say it was something of a wormholing experience. Here I am, a lifetime insomniac, shaken to the core by a book he's just read, watching a movie about another insomniac left shaken by the unexpected violence of an unpublished manuscript. A manuscript peopled with characters recognizable from her/my life.
To make an already unsettling experience even weirder, my author friend is a redhead who could be a ringer for Amy Adams and Isla Fisher. WTF?

As the film unfolded, I sat there with my jaw in my lap. Here I was watching a movie about the subjective experience of “reading” (literal, as in reading a book; figurative, as in the way self-reflection is a form of “reading” one’s own past), while undergoing a vivid, firsthand emotional reenactment of the same. 

“Sometimes, maybe it's not such a good idea to change things quite so much.”

THEMES
The intensity of Susan's remorse over the past--disaffection with the present, and existential disquietude arising from the metaphorical implications of her ex-husband's novel--forms Nocturnal Animals' threefold narrative structure. The ways in which these stories interrelate—mirror, comment upon, and reference one another- make Nocturnal Animals an aesthetically satisfying, sometimes harrowing, journey into the psyche of a woman on a path of self-confrontation. 

Green vs Red / Natural Instincts vs Violent Urges

The vivid red of violence is represented by the bright crimson light that floods the scene in which Susan breaks up with Edward (top), the curtain in the shanty room where Tony has his final confrontation with Ray (center), and by the scarlet lipstick worn by Susan (but eventually and tellingly removed) when she heads off for her fateful rendezvous with Edward.

Signifying perhaps a violent nature and the human impulse, Nocturnal Animals has Ray Marcus' green cowboy boots, his vintage Pontiac GTO, and Susan's "absolution dress" all sharing the same vivid green color.

As a symbol of nature, the color green and those associated with it come to signify the "nocturnal animals" populating the landscape of Susan's reality.

Art director Shane Valentino has said in interviews that the look of Nocturnal Animals was inspired in part by Antonioni's 1964 film Red Desert. In that film, a visual poem on alienation and the modern world, the colors green and red reach out to us from a bleak landscape of industrial gray. 

Red hair on a red sofa features prominently in two scenes of devastation: one emotional, where Susan betrays her lack of faith in Edward, and another physical, depicting two senseless murders.

Blinded

The glare from the stainless steel gate of Susan's fortress-like home momentarily blinds her in an image mirrored in Edward's novel when the character of Tony is blinded by an assailant. A bone of contention in Susan and Edward's marriage was Susan's blind spot when it came to her suppressed creativity and the way she failed to see the values she and her mother had in common. 

Spiritual Desolation

Nocturnal Animals is a tale of guilt, retribution, hoped-for redemption, and, most foreseeably, damnation. As characters abandon their humanity and as illusions of safety spiral into chaos, images of churches and crosses appear at increasingly regular intervals throughout the film. Top: A church stands alone in a barren landscape. Center: Edward/Tony wears a cross around his neck similar to that which is worn by his daughter in the novel, and by Susan. It's also the item he is clutching at the end of the novel. Bottom: Shaken by Edward's novel, Susan is frequently shown clutching the cross she wears around her neck as she reads. Raised a Catholic, Susan is guilt-ridden over having had an abortion without telling Edward, the violent death of a child in his novel, feeling like a veiled indictment.

Caged Animals

Recurring motifs of barred, glass interiors emphasize not only the isolation of the characters, but also reinforce the fear of being known or exposed (Susan remarks that her husband finds their declining fortunes "embarrassing." Likewise, she expresses feeling embarrassed after confiding in a friend). The remote interiors, with their bold framing lines and large glass panes, simultaneously resemble prisons, art installations, or cages in a human zoo. (Top: Susan's cold and foreboding home. Center: Texas interrogation room. Bottom: Yamashiro restaurant, Los Angeles.)

“Why did you give up on becoming an artist?”

STYLE

As if we hadn’t already traveled this path and learned our lesson from Stanley Kubrick, Michael Powell, and Alfred Hitchcock, many critics seem stalled on the dramatic visual style of Nocturnal Animals. The look chosen for this sparsely populated, introspective thriller is visually striking, often breathtakingly so, but some can’t seem to get past the curated gloss to access the story and characters within. The directors listed above were often criticized for the stylization of their films, but now that they’ve passed away (which is how it goes, I guess), everyone hails the artistic eloquence of their fluency in the visual language of cinema. 

The Los Angeles of Nocturnal Animals is no sunny vision of Paradise.
It's a cold, barely inhabited, slate-blue environment of gray skies and incessant rain 

No one is depicted outdoors in Ford's vision of Los Angeles. Like a formaldehyde-encased art installation, Susan occupies sterile interiors 

The narrative structure of Nocturnal Animals called upon Tom Ford and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey (in collaboration with the invaluable contributions of production designer Shane Valentino, art director Christopher Brown, and set decorator Meg Everist) to create the three distinct worlds representing Susan's reality. 

In a story told almost entirely from the internal and external perspective of its main character, one of the more arresting aspects of Nocturnal Animals is not merely that these worlds have to be depicted in different ways, but that they have to be depicted in ways subtly conveying that they are the not-entirely-realistic impressions of a single individual.  

As imagined by Susan, the West Texas desert is a vast, arid, sunbaked wasteland,
nightmarishly beautiful and  ominously desolate

With Susan so often shown in states of isolation within empty, cavernous environments, silently grappling with self-reflection, self-evaluation, and, most painfully, self-recrimination; the visual style takes over the storytelling. And while the images convey details, both significant and small, about Susan and her life, their evocation and content is consistently influenced by the loss of emotional equilibrium she experiences as the film progresses. The impact her ex-husband's novel has on Susan creates a mounting sense of unease in the character, reflected in the film's darker palette, heightened sense of menace, and discomfiting cold images.

Susan's flashbacks are naturalistic and warm in tone. They include the film's rare moments of affectionate human contact. In these sequences, dramatic moments are often punctuated with extreme bursts of color: a red velvet sofa, the bright scarlet of a street light, the stark whiteness of a dress

As these three concurrently running narratives bleed in and out of one another, the strong visual style of the segments guide us (per Susan's perceptions) as the individuals and actions in each story come to mirror and comment upon one another; both literally (clean-shaven Edward, red-headed mother and daughter) and allegorically (Hutton Morrow/Ray Marcus as handsome instruments of emotional violence and destruction).

There will always be those who feel that stylization and technical gloss in a film is emotionally distancing, and that visual grit is somehow closer to truth. I'm not in that camp, however, so I can appreciate that the Architectural Digest sheen of some parts of Nocturnal Animals carry as much dramatic weight as those cinema vérité, too-close-for-comfort close-ups in the fictional Texas narrative.

ART

Susan Morrow owns a successful art gallery and serves on the board of a major museum. As an art dealer, curator, and collector, Susan is haunted by her ex-husband's admonition that she studies art because she lacks the courage to be an artist herself. Though art plays a significant role in her life, over the years, that seed of doubt planted by her husband's words, along with her own uncertainty about the path she has chosen, has taken root as a cynical (healthy?) disdain for what passes for art in her world. Certainly, her gallery's multimedia installation combining images of nude obese women and kitsch Americana seems to suggest that her disillusionment with her profession is well-founded.

Carlos

"I thought the work was incredibly strong. So perfect with this junk culture we live in."

Susan

"It is junk. Total junk."

Nocturnal Animals, a work of art itself, makes inspired use of artwork throughout, informing character and providing silent commentary on the film's themes.

Exquisite Pain
Artist Damien Hirst depicts the death of Saint Sebastian as a steer pierced by arrows. My partner reminded me that Saint Sebastian is the patron saint of those who desire a holy death. Something Susan, as a Catholic, might fear is lost to her

Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog sculpture graces the backyard of Susan and Hutton's grotesquely ginormous home. As indicated by the crane, the sculpture, along with several crated art items in the house, is slated to be sold by the financially beleaguered couple.

A jarring photograph by Richard Misrach (Desert Fire #153), appearing to depict a ritual killing in the desert, is located in the entryway of Susan's home. Perhaps the source of the vision of Texas Susan imagines while reading Edward's manuscript?

Mooning
The blood-red wall of Susan's austere and decorously spartan office is adorned
 by John Currin's "Nude in a Convex Mirror."

“Nobody gets away with what you did. Nobody.”

THE ENDING

I feel it’s important to stress that this essay is my personal, subjective analysis of Nocturnal Animals, representative of how the film spoke to me. I intend neither an unequivocal “explanation” of the film and its themes, nor a wholesale endorsement encouraging the reader to run out and buy tickets, guaranteed of having the same experience. The mere fact that I have absolutely no complaints with the film stands as evidence of my lack of objectivity. I loved everything about this movie. From the brilliance of the performances to Ford's deft direction and stylistic touches, Nocturnal Animals is just my kind of cinema.

Because my experience was so rewarding,  I've enjoyed reading about how problematic so many people found the film's conclusion to be. It's an astonishingly powerful ending as far as I'm concerned, and the fact that I didn't anticipate it in the least—in spite of its thematic consistency—is what I loved about it. It's one of those endings that thirty people can watch and no two of them will be in exact accord as to what it all means. Some find it frustratingly vague; me, it takes me back to the heyday of '70s cinema when filmmakers were fine with making movies open to multiple interpretations, then leaving viewers to draw their own conclusions. 

I won't be offering an explanation to the ending here. But I will suggest that it is neither as devastating nor as positive as one might initially presume. Merely consider what I mentioned earlier, that, at least as far as what I've discovered to be true in my own life, growth and happiness are sometimes only possible through the lessons one learns through pain and loss. In which case, what may appear at first glance to be hopeless and devastating about the conclusion of Nocturnal Animals might, in reality, be the key to ultimately freeing a particular nocturnal animal from her many cages.  

“You just can't walk from things all the time." 

Amy Adams and Zawe Ashton in a clip from "Nocturnal Animals" (2016)

Copyright © Ken Anderson     2009 - 2017

BEHIND THE CANDELABRA 2013

A motion picture comfortable in its own skin, about two men who weren’t.

Let’s see if I’ve got this straight (no pun intended): during its most repressed and puritanical years, Middle America, under the guise of “showman,” took to its heart a fey and outlandishly flamboyant, closeted gay man and kept him a star for over 50 years. Twenty-six years after his death, in the presumably more enlightened era of the 21^st century, a motion picture about the personal life of said showman (Waldziu [Walter] Valentino Liberace) is unable to land an American distributor because the subject matter is deemed “Too gay.” This from an industry that would greenlight Heaven’s Gate II if it contained ten seconds of girl-on-girl action.

What to take away from all this: 1. America prefers its gay men closeted, cartoonish, or nonthreateningly “other.” Preferably all three. 2. Unless viewed and validated through the prism of the heteronormative gaze (where the prerequisites are shame, self-pity, and a tacit plea for acceptance) America is uncomfortable with anything remotely approaching an authentic depiction of gay life. 3. Hollywood doesn’t acknowledge lesbians, only hot women having sex with one other (explaining, perhaps, why the phrase "too lesbian" has never been said by any heterosexual male at any time, ever)

. 

Steven Soderbergh’s gleefully impudent Liberace film Behind the Candelabra, eventually found a home on cable television, cable and the Internet being the only frontiers of risk left in today’s landscape of cinematic follow-the-leader. As an HBO TV-movie, Behind the Candelabra emerged a critical and ratings blockbuster and a multi-award winner. An outcome confirming perhaps that the term “too gay” is valueless except perhaps as a signifier of a studio head being “Too ignorant.”

Michael Douglas as Liberace

Matt Damon as Scott Thorson

Rob Lowe as Dr. Jack Startz

Debbie Reynolds as Frances Liberace

  

Celebrity biography films, with their built-in melodrama, potential for questionable impersonations, and cheesy reenactments of real-life events, can be a lot of trashy fun. They can also be fascinating glimpses into the smoke and mirrors artifice of fame culture, often revealing the sizable disconnect between a star's public image and their private reality. But, more often than not, they tend to be formulaic, dramatized chronologies of the career milestones of a public figure. Like an AV study guide for a class called Celebrity History 101.

Celebrity biopics have been around so long that they’ve ceased being a categorization and have evolved into their own genre. But since real life rarely occurs in perfect three-act format, the fashioning of a coherent, workable narrative out of the often haphazard and random events of a public figure’s life often proves to be an obstacle for screenwriters that is not easily surmounted. Hence, most film bios rely on the serviceable but grossly overused rags-to-riches trope:
Initial struggle followed by success, then disenchantment followed by downward career spiral, all of it culminating on a note of ultimate redemption. A format as fixed and set in concrete as the footprints outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater.

Cheyenne Jackson as Liberace protege Billy Leatherwood

I don't look to biographical films for documentary accuracy and adherence to facts, but it's frustrating when a bio appears hellbent on mythologizing its subject by skirting unpleasant truths. Similarly, I find dirt-only hatchet jobs to be as inherently dishonest and rose-colored as hagiographies. What I get excited about is when a filmmaker, in chronicling the life of a public figure, is able to seize upon a unique perspective which casts the work and life of the individual in broader context. To comment upon the difference between art and artifice, or perhaps hold up a mirror into which we, as a culture, can gaze and perhaps see something of ourselves reflected back. Something that might even indicate how we have played a part in making this individual a notable in the first place. 

The late Ken Russell, whose rhapsodically operatic films about the lives of classical composers gloriously transcended the usual “and then they wrote….” clichés, was a master of this. One can only imagine what a field day he would have had with Liberace’s excessive, troubled, and sequined-encrusted life.

Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Erin Brockovich), wisely choosing to ignore the directive of Liberace’s “Too much of a good thing is wonderful!” paraphrase of Mae West’s famous line, avoids the potential for baroque overkill in favor of looking at Liberace’s life through the downsized prism of domestic drama. Behind the Candelabra, a serio-comic take on the last ten years in the life of the legendarily overdressed entertainer (adapted from the ghostwritten memoirs of former lover and current hot mess, Scott Thorson), is devoted to good-naturedly reducing Liberace’s grandiose public persona down to as close to human scale as the showman's outsized lifestyle and personality will allow.

In the process, both Liberace and Thorson are granted a depth of humanity not readily apparent in Thorson's sordid kiss-and-tell recounting of their years-long, tabloid-ready association. Indeed, given that Liberace, talent and fame aside, could be easily characterized as just another eccentric narcissist, and Thorson no more than a naive opportunist; the screenplay by Richard LaGravenese treats both individuals with a kind of empathetic delicacy. Not dissimilar to the way Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor approached their Southern Gothic grotesques.
That may sound like faint praise, but one need only look at what happened with Mommie Dearest to appreciate what a considerable achievement it is for a film to find the humanity, no matter how small the capacity, in a public figure so ceaselessly devoted to turning themselves into a living caricature.

The Emmy-Award winning recreations of Liberace's beyond-outrageous costumes
are the work of Ellen Mirojnick and Robert Q. Mathews

One of entertainment history’s great head-shakers is the fact that anyone with a functioning brain and eyes in their head ever thought for a nanosecond that mononymous pianist/entertainer Liberace was straight. More fascinating still, if his fanbase was comprised exclusively of, as one critic put it “Teenage girls afraid of sex and middle-aged women no longer interested in it,” what does that say about the breadth and scope of his appeal?

At the start of Behind the Candelabra Liberace is 57-years-old, firmly ensconced in the Vegas glitz period of his career, and the successful plaintiff of several homosexuality libel suits. As the darling of the blue-haired set and with a stage show gayer than a Judy Garland convention, Liberace’s public disavowal of his true sexuality at this point was largely moot; just another ritualistically maintained aspect of his manufactured public image, no more authentic than the hair on his head or the diamonds in his lapels.

Blatantly “out” in his cloistered private life, Liberace, already on the ebb side of a relationship with prissy protégé Billy Leatherwood (Cheyenne Jackson), feels an instant attraction when introduced to 17-year-old veterinary trainee Scott Thorson (42-year-old Matt Damon) by mutual friend, Bob Black (Scott Bakula).

The Seduction
Watching Liberace perform at the Las Vegas Hilton, Scott Thorson is already hooked.
Scott Bakula, mustachioed and bescarfed, is one of Scott's pre-Liberace lovers

In the tradition of countless May/December romances the world over, one individual’s great wealth proves as equal and potent an aphrodisiac as the other's youth and beauty...and voila! Say goodbye to all rational obstacles otherwise posed by a 40-year age gap. Liberace and Scott Thorson embark upon a relationship that lasts six years. An affectionate and (by this film’s account, anyway) mutually loving cohabitation wherein the isolated entertainer and the teen with the history of being shuttled between foster homes, formed a marriage (of sorts) and became a family.

But Liberace and Scott Thorson were no Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, and their brief time together proved to be as toxic as it was intoxicating.

Given Liberace's personality, history, the insular nature of his life, and his at-crossed-purposes relationship with his sexuality, his mother, and his Catholic upbringing; it’s not exactly surprising that the riches he lavished upon his young paramour came with weirdly possessive strings. Nor was it as far-fetched as it sounds when Liberace launched on a plan to adopt Thorson, coming as it was from a place of kill-two-birds-with-one-stone pragmatism. Since gay marriage was illegal and gay couples had no legal protections or rights under heterosexist laws, adoption was the loophole by which many long-term gay couples availed themselves in order to gain legal protection in cases of illness and death. The second advantage to the adoption idea was that Liberace could further promote his heterosexual image by pawning Thorson off as his biological son.
The late Sydney Guilaroff, the famed, closeted hairdresser to the stars, did this very thing; he adopted his (much younger) male lover and publicly passed him off as his grandson.

No, where things take a turn for the bizarre is when Liberace has Thorson undergo extensive plastic surgery to resemble the pianist in his younger days. A strange request given that Liberace was always a rather peculiar-looking man, but understandable in light of it serving the dual purpose of feeding Liberace’s narcissism while further supporting the heterosexuality-reaffirming biological son gambit.

"I want you to make Scott look like this."
Liberace, whose private life and obsessions make him come across like the gay Hugh Hefner or Howard Hughes, enlists the services of a plastic surgeon to perform an unorthodox (if not downright creepy) variation on the traditional sugar-daddy-buys-mistress-a-boob-job routine

As drug use and petty jealousies escalated, and mutual sexual attraction waned, Thorson, at the ripe old age of 23, found himself the himbo soon to be put out to pasture to make way for the next “Blonde Adonis” on Liberace’s list. The latter part of Behind the Candelabra veers to the dark side as it recounts the painful circumstances precipitating the pair’s rancorous parting, complete with Liberace having his greatest fears being realized when Thorson files a very public palimony suit against him to the tune of $113 million. The lengthy court battle lasted nearly as long as the relationship itself, ultimately being settled out of court for $75,000).

Liberace succumbed to AIDS in 1987, keeping that closet door shut (at least in his mind) to the last. Behind the Candelabra affords the estranged couple a deathbed reconciliation and Liberace a glittering, heaven-bound sendoff more fitting than the modest burial he was given in real life.

Paul Reiser as Scott Thorson's attorney for the palimony suit he filed after
being evicted from Liberace's home. The ugly battle stretched out for four years

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I’ve never been a fan of Liberace nor much understood his appeal (although if you haven't already seen it, I recommend you run, don't walk, to get your hands on the hooty 1955 film Sincerely Yours). But he’s one of those old-fashioned show-biz “personalities” who has their act so down pat, they’re rather difficult to actually dislike. Check out any of his TV appearances on YouTube and you’ll see a man who has mastered the art of amiable subterfuge. Repeating the same self-deprecating jokes and anecdotes for what must be decades, Liberace skillfully hides behind witty patter and good-natured evasion.

Like a politician, he’s able to speak sincerely and at great length without ever once approaching the truth or revealing anything about himself he hasn’t already calculated he wants you to know. All the while coming across as genuine, friendly, and accessible. It would be terrifying if it weren’t so entertaining. (Dolly Parton and Charo are the only stars I know today to possess a similar quality.)

With nothing to go on in the way of recorded images of the showman just being himself, I'm impressed by how screenwriter Richard LaGravenese was able to forge so richly a dimensional representation of Liberace. One gets the impression of a gravely lonely man of not overwhelming depth-of-character who is simultaneously believable (and quite frightening) as both powerful and selfishly controlling.

Behind the Candelabra paints a portrait of a gay man who has learned (all too well) the lessons for survival taught to him by society (homosexuality was illegal much of Liberace's adult life) and the Church (he was devout Catholic). The lesson: you must learn to exist as two people: one for your private life, one for public consumption. And of course, Liberace’s extreme, schizophrenically dual existence is but a gold-plated, gilt-edged amplification of the day-to-day reality for millions of gay men living in a society that encourages masks and role-playing for those outside of the heteronormative standard.

By exploring the Liberace/Thorson relationship beyond the extremes of lifestyle and eccentricities of character, Behind the Candelabra draws provocative and amusing parallels between the roles the couple adopted in public (Liberace is a heterosexual, Thorson his chauffeur) and the roles they assumed in private (ironically, a realm where Liberace proved more comfortable in his sexuality than the prudish Thorson, who clung unconvincingly to his "bisexual" life preserver).

If Behind the Candelabra is to be believed, it must be said that for all his public artifice, Liberace was nothing if not his fully out and authentic self in his private life. And while I’ve never found anything admirable in his distancing himself from anything remotely connected to the gay community in his lifetime, it’s difficult not to acknowledge how the outrageousness of his stage persona couldn't help but expand the boundaries of what was acceptable for a male performer to be (and look like) onstage. And getting the Bible-belters to swallow it, yet! Liberace was definitely a product of his time, but as closeted as he was, it's somewhat miraculous that he never resorted to going through a sham heterosexual marriage like his heir-apparent in sequined crass, Elton John.

Lee and Scott, Fat and Happy

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Whether true to the real-life circumstances or not, Behind the Candelabra is a love story...a marriage, in fact. And what I so admire about the film is that it tells this same-sexy love story in a language no different from what you’d see in any other film about dysfunctional romance (Closer, Blue Valentine). Unconcerned with the comfort levels of the audience, gay respectability politics, or whether or not it will “play in Peoria”; Behind the Candelabra depicts two people in an intimate relationship as it should be: kissing, caressing, bickering, fucking, and going about their lives in the manner of countless couples the world over. It's a credit to the filmmakers that the extreme trappings of wealth and eccentricity emblematic of Liberace's life never overwhelm the human element.

PERFORMANCES

I’ve seen Michael Douglas in a great many films since his debut in Hail, Hero! in 1969, but I honestly think his Liberace is the best work he’s ever done. He’s remarkable. Referencing Mommie Dearest yet again, Douglas was given a public figure every bit as over the top as Crawford (more, actually) and somehow found a way to access the complexity behind a conspicuously superficial image. In the early scenes of courtship, Douglas captures Liberace's studied vulnerability and manipulative neediness, yet still makes us see these are simply the survival tools of an aging, lonely, isolated man. Later, when his tough side emerges (a flamboyant gay man who manages to sustain a show business career for more than four decades HAS to have a tough side), the image of Liberace as a hard-edged survivor is made startlingly believable. 

Garrett M. Brown and Jane Morris are standouts as Scott's concerned foster parents

Without looking exactly like him, Douglas captures the essence of the Liberace we know, embellishing this mini-impersonation of the stage personality with a well-conceived characterization of a Liberace away from the public glare. In an astoundingly vanity-free performance, Douglas achieves the impossible: he turns Liberace into an authentic human being. Michael Douglas surprised the hell out of me with this film and he deserved every one of the many awards his performance garnered.

Dan Aykroyd as Liberace's fix-it-all manager Seymour Heller

For all the issues I have with Matt Damon, the man (occasionally he just needs to shut the fuck up), I like him a great deal as an actor. Playing a perhaps less guileful version of Scott Thorson than the real deal, Damon’s reactive performance is easier to overlook. But like a painter working with a blank canvas (and if you’ve ever seen one of the real-life Thorson's numerous television appearances, you'll know they don't come much blanker) Damon imbues the character with a grifter's survival instinct and an urchin's willingness to please that grows quite poignant in the latter third of the film when the relationship starts to sour (as good as they are in the film’s earlier scenes, both actors are at their best when these individuals are at their worst.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
With its gold-cast cinematography, impeccable eye for period detail in costuming and wigs, and painstaking recreation of Liberace's world of "palatial kitsch"; Behind the Candelabra is, as might be expected for a film about the life of one of show business's showiest showmen, a real visual treat. I suspect the visual haze and yellow glow also serve to soften the effect of the many prosthetic devices and makeup effects, as well as the digital work employed during Michael Douglas's scenes at the piano and during the finale where he appears younger than springtime.
I loved the film's sharp and funny script and its solid performances throughout (Debbie Reynolds is particularly good). As movie bios go, Behind the Candelabra doesn't rewrite the book, but it deserves kudos for being able to fashion something emotionally and dramatically compelling out of a personality and public figure who practically dared the world to take him seriously.

BONUS MATERIAL

Seeing is believing: The real Liberace and Scott Thorson, Las Vegas 1981

Liberace's oddness is used to excellent effect in Tony Richardson's brilliant satire of California and the funeral business, The Loved One (1965). Cast as "Casket Specialist" Mr. Starker, Liberace pretty much only has to play himself, but he's hilarious and looks infinitely more at ease hawking coffins than he did in his love scenes with Dorothy Malone in Sincerely Yours. 

Opened by Liberace himself in 1979, the no-longer-in-existence Liberace Museum in Las Vegas (it closed in 2013) had several buildings housing a collection of Liberace's performance costumes, automobiles, and pianos (not to mention the biggest rhinestone in the world). Located in a surprisingly unassuming mall just off the Strip, the location also contained Candelabra, Liberace's own restaurant. My partner and I visited it back in 2005 and it was a blast. I've never seen so many mirrors, rhinestones, and candelabras in all my life. You seriously could go glitter-blind in this place. The sheet music adorning the side of the building (below) is one of his performance staples, "The Beer Barrel Polka." 

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2016