It’s a sad indictment of US movie studios that none of them would pick up the story of Liberace’s love affair with his chauffeur Scott (played by Matt Damon), so the film had to appear on HBO in America, not the cinema where it belongs.
Michael Douglas is always worth watching. Even in The Sentinel. No wonder Soderbergh forced him to wait a year after he got the cancer all-clear before shooting this film. Liberace is the role of his lifetime, and requires, well, a lot of life. Douglas does it justice. By turns creepy and guileless, loving and cruel, funny and egotistical, blind and self-aware, his Liberace is brilliant. He should get an Oscar just for the bit in a porn shop where he pops his head above a video booth door, simultaneously high, demonic and angelic, his eyes ablaze with virility and joie de vivre, and laughs at his far-younger lover who has passed out on the floor, out-paced and out-sexed by a buzzing pensioner.
Though there are plenty of scenes where Douglas looks just fabulous, there are many more requiring him to leave vanity at the door. It's a breathtaking moment when he presents a sagging, wattled body and balding pate for the camera’s scrutiny, stripped of costume and wig.
Energy suffuses the film, driving it headlong from the dizzying introduction of rural Scott to Liberace’s gilded world (full of male “helpers” who are well aware that Scott is about to replace them, as they replaced the young men who came before them), to the pianist's death from an AIDS-related illness.
And it is always funny, even when he dies. There’s a shocking sequence where Liberace persuades Scott to have plastic surgery to look more like him. It could have been played, with some justification, to make Liberace look like a monster. Instead, yes, it is gross, but also very funny.
Energy suffuses the film, driving it headlong from the dizzying introduction of rural Scott to Liberace’s gilded world (full of male “helpers” who are well aware that Scott is about to replace them, as they replaced the young men who came before them), to the pianist's death from an AIDS-related illness.
And it is always funny, even when he dies. There’s a shocking sequence where Liberace persuades Scott to have plastic surgery to look more like him. It could have been played, with some justification, to make Liberace look like a monster. Instead, yes, it is gross, but also very funny.
Even Rob Lowe, given a stretched face with tiny, watery eye-slits to play Liberace’s unscrupulous plastic surgeon, is too fun to hate, despite readily agreeing to cut naïve Scott, and happily getting him addicted to drugs.
The ageing and de-aging effects look seamless (except when the seams are meant to show) as Scott and Liberace get older, younger, fatter, thinner, ill. But behind the amazing make-up, and the costumes and the camp, is a grown-up love story. Neither is innocent, though both are innocents. Scott absolutely, in the beginning, and Liberace always, in his way, clumsily wielding his material wealth and affections, addicted to love but allergic to constancy. We're used to the clichéd rise and fall, but Liberace (unexpectedly considering), offers something less superficial, and more subtle, an undulating depiction of a relationship, full of rhinestone peaks and buttock-shaped valleys.
Plus it features Dan Ackroyd, Scott Bakula and Carter Burke from Aliens. Can’t argue with that.
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