Michael Douglas plays Liberace soft, watchful and entirely in control, Matt Damon lets himself be remade in another man’s image, and Steven Soderbergh shoots the whole affair without a smirk. The second half follows a well-worn path, but it is a fine one.
Steven Soderbergh made Behind the Candelabra for American television, and it was billed at the time as his last film. Over here it went into cinemas, on 7 June 2013, and it deserved the bigger screen. It is a story about a famous man and the young man he bought, and Soderbergh, who also shot and edited it, tells it without a smirk. Not once does the camera invite us to laugh at Liberace behind his back. Whatever the film finds funny, and it finds a great deal funny, it lets Liberace be in on the joke.
Michael Douglas is the reason to see it. He does not do an impression. The voice is a soft, coaxing purr with the vowels pushed forward, and the smile comes on and off like a stage light, but what he is playing is a man who has spent a lifetime working out what each person in front of him wants and what it will cost. Watch him at the piano at home, playing for one guest as if for two thousand. The moment that caught us off guard comes in a bedroom, when the hairpiece comes off and Douglas, bald and blinking, asks Scott not to look. It moved us more than we expected, because for a second nobody is performing, and the film has taught us by then how rare that is in this house.
Matt Damon is plainly too old to be playing a boy barely out of foster care, and neither he nor Soderbergh pretends otherwise. It works because the film is about being remade, and Ellen Mirojnick’s costumes do half the acting: Scott arrives in denim, is put into matching white suits, and ends up onstage in a rhinestone chauffeur’s uniform, his own face steadily turning into a copy of the one beside him. Howard Cummings fills the house with mirror, marble and gilt so that there is nowhere to stand without seeing yourself. Soderbergh, working as his own cinematographer, lights it all warm and gold rather than harsh. He lets it be beautiful, because Liberace thought it was beautiful, and so, for a while, does Scott.
The supporting cast are used sparingly and well. Dan Aykroyd’s Seymour Heller, the manager, treats Liberace’s private life as a scheduling problem and is right to. Scott Bakula, as the friend who makes the introduction, has the wariness of a man who has seen this before. Rob Lowe plays Dr Jack Startz, the plastic surgeon, with a face pulled so tight it appears to have been ironed, and we laughed every time he spoke, then felt slightly ashamed, since the joke is a man selling other people the thing he has done to himself. Cheyenne Jackson has a few scenes as Billy Leatherwood, the young man Scott replaces, and he does not need more than a few.
Richard LaGravenese’s script, adapted from Scott Thorson’s memoir, is witty and clean, and in its second half it goes where stories of kept young men usually go. We will not spell out where. None of it is badly done and all of it is expected. Scott stays a little blank, too: we know what is done to him and less about what he wanted, and Damon, good as he is at looking dazzled, cannot fill in what the script leaves out. Marvin Hamlisch’s score keeps its head down and leaves the field to the piano, which is right, though it means the music never tells us anything Liberace’s own does not. Soderbergh, cutting his own footage, ends scenes a line before you expect. It keeps 118 minutes moving. It also keeps us at arm’s length, and by the last reel we were admiring the film rather than aching with it.
Against Soderbergh’s own work it sits high. It has the speed of Out of Sight and the interest in what things cost that runs through Magic Mike, and it is warmer than either. Most critics have taken it as one of his best, and we would not go quite that far, but we would not argue hard.
It was made for television, and it looks better than most films that were not. Watch it at home with the lights down and the sound up, so the piano fills the house. That is how Liberace would have wanted it, and for once he would have been right.
