Monthly Archives: September 2015

  • Behind the Candelabra

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Soderbergh (2013)

    Scott Thorson was working as a movie animal trainer when he went with a Hollywood producer called Bob Black to watch Liberace perform in a club, in 1976.  Thorson was introduced to the celebrity pianist backstage before being invited to his palatial home in Beverly Hills.   It’s possible that Liberace took a more instant shine to the young man because he was able to help treat an eye ailment from which one of Liberace’s dogs was suffering; in any case, Scott himself very soon became a lap dog – Liberace’s ‘assistant’, chauffeur and lover.  The screenplay for Behind the Candelabra, by Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King, The Bridges of Madison County, The Mirror Has Two Faces), is adapted from Behind the Candelabra: My Life With Liberace, which Thorson wrote ‘with’ Alex Thorleifson.  Wladziu Valentino Liberace denied until his dying day that he was homosexual.  In spite of abundant evidence of his gayness in what appears on screen in Behind the Candelabra, I guess it’s arguable that Liberace’s sexual identity was primarily narcissistic:  he was not only possessive of Thorson but arranged plastic surgery so that Scott would look more like him.  Online images of Scott Thorson suggest that the treatment was rather more successful in achieving this aim than you might think from watching this film.

    Michael Douglas’s Liberace, in what Steven Soderbergh threatens (again?) will be the last movie that he makes, has been rightly praised.   Because Hollywood studios deemed the subject matter ‘too gay’, Behind the Candelabra premiered on television, on HBO, and won’t therefore be eligible for Academy Awards – otherwise Douglas would surely have been nominated for an Oscar (he has been nominated for an Emmy).  Does the fearlessness of his portrait of Liberace come from playing someone very different from himself or owe something to recent serious illness, which has decided Douglas to seize the day?  Perhaps both.  Whatever the reasons, he displays a wit and, more than that, a zest for performance that I’ve never seen from him before (but which recalls his father).  I remember Liberace as a middle-aged man whose appearance was striking, almost repulsive, because his unprepossessing looks were so at odds with the glitz and the jewels and furs that he wore.  I don’t find it easy to understand, even looking at Google images of the younger man, how he could ever have been the object of female desire that he seemingly was.  Because Michael Douglas is good-looking, the effect of his Liberace is very different.  The age gap between Liberace and Scott Thorson, forty years his junior, supplies a creepy edge but there’s no doubting Douglas’s seductive quality in the role.  If you’d seen Liberace in performance without knowing he was a big star, you might have imagined this was someone doing a garish take-off of a ‘real’ star – egregiously ingratiating, dazzlingly insincere.  Douglas isn’t so good delivering the stage spiel – he’s not sickening enough – and this does slightly detract from the contrast between Liberace’s public and private personas.  But I liked the way Douglas worked the piano so that the playing is a technically brilliant party piece, devoid of artistry.  If he looked or sounded more like the original than he does he would be difficult to stomach for two hours.  Douglas’s Liberace is possibly too likeable but this isn’t because of anything evasive in what the actor does.

    Matt Damon, who’s twenty-five years older than Scott Thorson was when his relationship with Liberace began, is remarkably physically convincing at every point of the film.  So too are most of the bodily and facial changes that Scott undergoes, although the weight gain that has to be countered by diet pills, which prove addictive, is a bit sudden,   Damon is good at expressing Scott’s docile innocence at the start and his performance is strong throughout.  Some of the praise for it is thanks, though, to the character being such an unusual one for Damon to play and in some respects he’s not well cast:  a brittle temperament and extreme emotionality don’t come easily to him.  He is excellent, however, in a scene in which Scott is struggling to hold his own in the legal wrangles that followed his break-up with Liberace.  Here, with Scott struck dumb as he struggles to think, let alone articulate his thoughts, Damon gets across a limited intelligence in a way I’ve rarely seen him do before (perhaps his own intelligence has got in the way).  The limitations of Damon’s portrait aren’t major but they become conspicuous because the film is increasingly Scott’s story – I reckon Damon has more screen time than Douglas – and this links to a larger problem with the material:  Scott Thorson is not an interesting person and although Liberace is more interesting there’s not much to reveal about him in his private life.  His public denial of his homosexuality and continuing bachelorhood may have doubly reassured his middle-aged to elderly female fans (maybe their feelings were predominantly maternal – but plenty of mothers don’t want their son to get married).  Even so, his sexual orientation must have been an open secret if Behind the Candelabra is anything like accurate about the number of men that he flirted and/or went to bed with, especially when there was no wife or continuous female companion to suggest otherwise.  As a result, Steven Soderbergh and Richard LaGravenese rely increasingly on accumulating description rather than dramatic revelation.

    I really liked the film’s account of how Scott becomes part of the ménage(rie).  Soderbergh manages to combine a cool distance with a flavour of what I take to be the characteristic tone of kiss-and-tell memoirs.   It’s possible this style would have become tedious after a while but I missed it once it was gone:  with few layers to peel away to get to the truth of the relationship, Soderbergh has nowhere to go except forward.  There are several effective and amusing episodes – especially the gruesome cosmetic surgery, presided over by Rob Lowe as Dr Jack Startz, his own face-lifted smile suggesting Fu Manchu – but Behind the Candelabra turns into a lineal account of Scott Thorson’s years with Liberace.  As domestic melodrama, it’s reasonably sophisticated – it’s not the case that once things start turning sour the downward trajectory of the relationship is uninterrupted – but it’s thin.  Soderbergh does succeed, though, in making the physical context of the story multi-faceted.  The extravagant opulence of La Casa de Liberace – conspicuous wealth is a severe understatement – is amusing, magical (in a childish way) and disgusting.  The story spans just over a decade, ending with Liberace’s death in 1987:  in other words, it begins pre-AIDS and ends in a time heavily shadowed by the disease.   Soderbergh manages to suggest, but not too emphatically, a connection between the darkening mood inside Liberace’s mansion and in the gay world outside.  There’s also a suggestion in the film of a bygone age when homosexuality could be kept hidden by stars.  Then Soderbergh shows – and this is emphatic – a newspaper headline announcing Rock Hudson’s death in 1985; and a coroner’s autopsy report brutally supplants the euphemistic statement issued by Liberace’s personal physician.   The implication of the film is that celebrity sexual dissimulation has become a thing of the past but I’m not sure I believe this.  When exactly (and why) did press behaviour change?  It’s striking that, even today, there are few stars whose public or screen personas demand that they are straight who have come out as gay.

    Richard LaGravenese has written plenty of good, caustic dialogue and there are strong supporting performances – from Scott Bakula (Bob Black), Jane Morris and Garrett M Brown (Scott’s foster parents – the latest in a long line), Boyd Holbrook (Scott’s replacement in Liberace’s household) and Dan Aykroyd (Liberace’s manager).  Aykroyd was unrecognisable to me – as was Debbie Reynolds, hidden under a false nose as Liberace’s mother, Frances.  This casting is resonant because Reynolds carries with her suggestions of the determinedly sunny presentation of light entertainment decades ago.  She isn’t sufficiently self-absorbed when the old lady is lamenting her loneliness but she’s excellent when Frances triumphs on the fruit machines in her son’s palace and demands her winnings in real cash. Soderbergh, as usual, was his own director of photography (as Peter Andrews) and editor (as Mary Ann Bernard).   The music for Behind the Candelabra was the last score composed by Marvin Hamlisch, who died last year.

    8 June 2013

  • The Wolfpack

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Crystal Moselle (2015)

    In 2010 Crystal Moselle, walking in Manhattan, caught sight of a very distinctive group of six boys, most of them teenagers, all with waist-length hair; their number, clothes and black Ray-Bans brought to mind the protagonists of Reservoir Dogs.   An interview with Moselle in Variety in June this year describes what happened next:

    ‘Struck by their intriguing appearance, she chased them down the street, and introduced herself … Moselle and the brothers bonded over their love of cinema, and she soon learned about their cache of home movies, in which they re-enact their favorite films with sets, props and costumes made from whatever was lying around …

    What she didn’t know when she initially decided to make a documentary about the sensitive and intelligent young men was their dark secret. “At first, I thought it would be this sweet little film about these kids making movies and figuring out how to get into the movie business,” Moselle says. That changed when she learned the brothers had lived virtually their entire lives locked inside a four-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side at the insistence of their paranoid father, who also kept their mother confined.’

    The six Angulo brothers, whose ages now range from sixteen to twenty-three, are highly engaging, both as camera subjects and to listen to.  But as I watched The Wolfpack, I became more interested in how Crystal Moselle’s documentary had been made – in how the arrival of Moselle and a film crew in the Angulos’ home began to influence the lives that she presents.

    The boys’ mother, Susanne, is from the American Midwest.  She met Oscar Angulo, a Peruvian, when he was a tour guide on the Machu Picchu trail in the late 1980s.  They fell in love and travelled together and in 1990 went to live in a Hare Krishna centre in West Virginia, where their first four children were born.  After some time on the road, with Oscar trying unsuccessfully to make it as a rock singer, they moved to New York.  Crystal Moselle interviews the parents, as well as their sons.   Oscar, who evidently has a strong alcohol dependency, explains that, after travelling abroad, he wanted to make a life in Scandinavia but it didn’t happen.   Susanne expresses regret that her children didn’t have the open-air Midwest upbringing that she enjoyed.  Both parents were alarmed by violence in the New York neighbourhoods in which they initially lived.  They moved to a housing project in the Lower East Side in 1996 and, for well over a decade after that, Oscar forbade Susanne and the children from leaving the apartment unaccompanied.  (It’s an unhappy irony that, according to others in the film, Oscar has a history of domestic violence.)  Family excursions into the world outside were rarely more than two or three a year.  The Angulos have seven children in all.  Their only daughter, Visnu, is the eldest and has cognitive disabilities.  Although she appears in The Wolfpack, she isn’t interviewed by Moselle:  overweight and torpid, Visnu is, beside her variously lively brothers, a saddening presence.  The boys too have names from Hindu scriptures – Bhagavan, the twins Govinda and Narayana, Makunda, Krisna and Jagadesh.

    The primacy of movies in the brothers’ lives is an essential theme of The Wolfpack and perhaps it’s apt that the Angulos’ story, as Crystal Moselle tells it, includes devices familiar from screen fiction.  There is, for example, a Turning Point.  In January 2010, Mukunda, the most extravert of the brothers, decided to disobey his father.  Mukunda managed to get out of the apartment building and walked round Manhattan, wearing a homemade mask modelled on the one worn by Michael Myers in the Halloween films.  It seems that Mukunda wore the mask purely for purposes of disguise but he was picked up the police and subsequently spent a short time in a mental hospital.  His pioneering example encouraged Mukunda’s brothers to follow suit (although the film is sketchy as to how exactly they did so:  did they get their own keys or keep absconding?) and they were regularly going out by the time Crystal Moselle spotted them later in the same year.  Mukunda’s escape is presented in the film as the breaking of Oscar Angulo’s malignant spell.  The idea is emotionally appealing – it’s easy to see his long-haired sons, in their sixteenth-floor apartment, as urban male Rapunzels.  Yet the longer The Wolfpack went on, the more uneasy I was with Crystal Moselle’s narrative tactics.  She withholds information about the Angulos in order to emphasise both the extraordinariness of their situation and personalities, and the salvation-by-movies aspect of the story.

    After Mukunda had been interviewed by police and doctors, the Angulo brothers were, according to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, ‘in therapy for a couple of years’ although ‘Child services and police spokesmen said privacy laws precluded them from confirming this …’  There is some discussion in The Wolfpack of Mukunda’s time in hospital but Crystal Moselle is silent as to whether the family’s bizarre way of life, once it had come to light, was investigated by social workers or officers of the law.  The brothers, although they’re still relatively socially inexperienced and their manner is eccentric, are notably bright and articulate.  One of them mentions his mother’s home-schooling licence and we gather that, since Oscar has long been a conscientious objector to working for a living, the teaching fees that Susanne receives from local government have been the family’s sole source of employment income.  There’s virtually no further reference to the home schooling, however.  It’s clearly inconceivable that the New York City authorities didn’t conduct periodic checks on its efficacy:  the NYC regulations online today include, as you’d expect, syllabus prescriptions and the details of monitoring arrangements.  But Moselle wants to encourage the perception of the Angulos’ education that has appeared in several reviews of The Wolfpack: the boys watched movies continuously and their creative potential was realised entirely through doing so and through re-enacting scenes from their favourite movies.

    Moselle is determined too to characterise Susanne Angulo as a wife utterly dominated by a tyrant husband and as a mother who feels she’s let her children down because she was too fearful of Oscar to resist him.  Stressing almost exclusively this side of Susanne not only downplays the contribution she has probably made to her sons’ educational development; it also allows Moselle to give Susanne a convenient dramatic shape – increases the impact of her coming out of her shell later in the film.   It transpires that Susanne, influenced by Oscar, hasn’t been in touch with her own mother for decades (I seem to think fifty years was mentioned, even though that’s twice as long as Susanne and Oscar have been together).   When Susanne renews contact, in a telephone call to her mother, and emotionally tells her sons about this, the boys are excited but one of them reasonably asks, ‘So what happens next?’  By this stage of The Wolfpack, I was suspicious enough to think the honest answer would have been:  ‘I don’t know – let’s see what Crystal says’.

    The brothers are likeable and their resilient vitality is remarkable.  The resemblance to the Reservoir Dogs brigade that first caught Crystal Moselle’s attention (and which is confirmed on the poster advertising The Wolfpack) is not the only Quentin Tarantino connection.  The Angulos’ theatrical inventiveness in sequestered circumstances reminds you that the video rental store he once worked in – and where, cooped up, he watched films day-in-day-out – is widely regarded as a seedbed of Tarantino’s own creativity.  There is also a less appealing resonance with Tarantino – an artist who seems to see everything through a movie prism (and, in his two most recent films, has blithely subjugated historical fact to a cinephiliac reimagining of history).  I’m uncomfortable with the glorification and simplification of cinema that informs Crystal Moselle’s approach (and that also informs, I think, some of the enthusiastic reviews that The Wolfpack has received).  According to this film, movies are inherently and simply a force for good and against evil – and culturally unique in this respect.  There’s no suggestion that literature or any other art form or aspect of the Angulos’ home education could have had the same life-enhancing and sanity-saving effect.  Nor is there any recognition that continuous exposure to film might have brought about difficulties as well as pleasure.  Moselle barely touches, for example, on the growth of the boys’ sexual curiosity – even though watching large numbers of movies must have increased their awareness of sex, and even though the situation in which their father had placed his sons was already conducive to terrible sexual frustration.  You can see what an incredible thrill it is for the movie-obsessed Angulos to be the subject of a movie; there are now articles online suggesting that the success of Crystal Moselle’s directing debut could help them realise their own film-making ambitions.  This doesn’t alter the evidence of The Wolfpack that the brothers were exploited in the making of it.

    27 August 2015

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