Film: Behind the Candelabra

Liberace (Michael Douglas) meets Scott, played by Matt Damon

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Michael Douglas, Matt Damon, Dan Aykroyd, Rob Lowe
Certificate: 15 (118 mins)

The plot is relatively straightforward: after a backstage introduction, eighteen-year-old animal wrangler Scott Thorson catches Liberace’s eye and becomes his lover, apparently inadvertently pushing out the current favourites - Ambrose Hogan writes, on Thinking Faith. Liberace showers him with gifts and proposes to adopt him; a combination of drug use on one side and promiscuity on the other leads to the breakdown of the relationship. Litigation and its grim aftermath follow, then reconciliation shortly before Liberace’s death from AIDS-related illnesses in 1987.

For this review, I had been struggling to find what one might call ‘a way in’, particularly for the readers of Thinking Faith. I could have drawn on Liberace’s Catholicism, or his near-death vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but these only really get a passing reference in the film, so I will begin instead with what might seem a bizarre comparison between this film and the 1996 version of Emma (the one with Gwyneth Paltrow in the title role).

Only really serious cineastes read the credits, so here’s your chance to up your game: Emma, a full-length costume drama set in the early nineteenth century, lists 18 in the art-department (the set-dressers and the like); Behind the Candelabra, set in that far-off world of the late 1970s and mid-’80s, boasts an art department of over 70 (one of whom is, I suspect, very proud of his or her work on eBay sourcing the extraordinary collection of ornamental pianos – china, glass and diamante – that litter the set and form the back-drop to the closing titles).

To read on see: www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/FILM_20130613_2.htm