Behind the Candelabra – the Liberace biopic as sordid as its subject

4 days ago

Steven Soderbergh’s TV film honours the master pianist in the only appropriate way: with lurid spectacle“We, as gay people, we get to choose our family,” said RuPaul Charles in a frequently cited line from a 2013 episode of Drag Race.On a different channel that year, HBO aired Steven Soderbergh’s TV movie Behind the Candelabra, a film adaptation of Scott Thorson’s memoir of the same name.Published in 1988, a year after Liberace’s death, the memoir was a haunting account of Thorson’s relationship with the spangled, mononymous pianist – an unusual chosen family just begging to be depicted on screen.Brought to life by an extravagantly eyelinered Matt Damon, Thorson was Liberace’s live-in lover turned chauffeur.They dated for five pyrotechnic years before Thorson’s so-called “employment” was terminated by his celebrity boyfriend.

What really took place behind the candelabra? With his account Thorson invited the public on to the stage and into the bedroom of one of the most adored closeted homosexuals of the 20th century.The film introduces Thorson – who died at 65 last August – as a “lost babe in the woods”.When he meets Liberace (a flashy, effete Michael Douglas), he’s an impressionable 18-year-old who has spent his childhood in orphanages and foster homes, and his burgeoning adulthood pretending to be bisexual.“It’s funny that this crowd would like something this gay,” says Thorson, witnessing the magic of Liberace for the very first time.But the audiences of Liberace’s time were not equipped with today’s gaydar.

In fact, Liberace litigiously fought to ensure that they remained unaware of his private life even as he was considered a sex symbol of his time.In the film, we are asked to suspend our disbelief as Douglas’s head is digitally composited on to the body of actual piano player Philip Fortenberry.The illusion becomes a perfect inversion of Liberace’s performance: a straight actor playing a gay man playing straight.According to Liberace: people only see what they want to see.As the story goes, Thorson and Liberace go on to have a great love affair where everything is fabulous and too much is never enough.

Before long, Thorson finds himself in the lap of luxury, parading his hot bod around the many rooms of Liberace’s kitschy Las Vegas mansion in his rhinestone bathers.But the candelabra begins to dim when Liberace proposes adoption to his boy toy during pillow talk: “I want to be everything to you, Scott.I want to be father, brother, lover, best friend, everything.” And so the two choose to start a family the only way they can: with Liberace the adoptive parent of his orphaned boyfriend Scott, 40 years his junior.“I think I’d be a good daddy,” Liberace remarks unironically.

Is it perverse to desire parenthood so desperately? To add insult to injury, Liberace strips Thorson of the last vestiges of his individuality: his face,After a consultation with a plastic surgeon (a wonderfully stiff Rob Lowe), Liberace casually requests that his adoptive son undergo a transformation to look just like his father,With this, Behind the Candelabra quickly evolves into a gothic horror story rivalling Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde,Liberace’s obsession with youth bleeds into his obsession with the self in a grotesque portrait of imitation and flattery,It is a carnivalesque, psychosexual feast.

Liberace’s strange ventriloquy act – with Thorson his puppet – only further intensifies the enigma of his stagecraft and his life.Most of all, the film lives up to its subject in its pure spectacle, brimming with stage excess in its sordid tale about the showman who loved to give people a good time.The film suggests that Liberace was the first person to look directly at the camera on TV.His stardom coincided with the advent of television; from the 50s to the 70s, he was the highest paid entertainer in the world.It’s fitting, then, that Behind the Candelabra was produced for the small screen.

Rest in peace Liberace; you would’ve loved SBS On Demand.Behind the Candelabra is available to stream on SBS On Demand in Australia, Sundance Now in the UK, and Max in the US.For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here

cultureSee all

Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra/Dudamel review – epic Mahler is exhilarating but overwhelming

Say what you will about El Sistema (and controversies continue over the political status and inner workings of the 50-year-old youth music programme), but one thing remains unequivocal: the ferocious energy of its flagship Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela. For the first of two performances at Barbican as part of an anniversary European tour with its music director Gustavo Dudamel, the stage was as packed as the auditorium. Mahler’s Symphony No 3 is his longest work, scored for a massive orchestra and its musical ambitions sprawl weightily.In the orchestra’s hands, the score quivered and growled from the get-go. The string sound was almost airless in its density

1 day ago

‘The loom has a beauty and rhythm’: textile artist Diedrick Brackens on making poetry out of yarn

It is tempting to see it as a happy ending. In Diedrick Brackens’s Towards the greenest place on earth, two Black men in the artist’s signature silhouette form throw an arm about each other’s waists, while holding opposite ends of a broom. Perhaps they’re about to enact the wedding folk ritual and jump backwards over the besom, or fly away on it like witches. One of four large textile works in the US artist’s first UK show, Woven Stories, at the Holburne Museum in Bath, its companion pieces are somewhat less bucolic: suggestively mythic tableaux with hints of violent ritual.Talking to the artist via Zoom from his studio in Los Angeles, however, it becomes clear the tender scene is at most a moment of reprieve

1 day ago

‘The ghosts are everywhere’: can the British Museum survive its omni-crisis?

The British Museum is everybody’s idea of a museum, but at the same time, it is hardly like a museum at all. It is more like a little state. The rooms you visit on a day out are the least of it: the museum is not the contents of its display cases. It is an embassy, a university, a police station, a science lab, a customs house, a base for archaeological excavations, a place of asylum, a retail business, a publisher, a morgue, a detective agency. “We’re not a warehouse, [or] a mausoleum,” its chair, the UK’s former chancellor George Osborne, told guests at the museum’s annual trustees’ dinner in November

2 days ago

Tony Slattery obituary

Tony Slattery, who has died of a heart attack aged 65, showed his great talent for improvisational comedy on the Channel 4 show Whose Line Is It Anyway? He often appeared as one of the four performers creating characters, scenes and songs based on suggestions by its host, Clive Anderson, or the studio audience.“Whose Line is just four people and a couple of stools,” Slattery enthused. “It’s just a brilliantly simple idea. The audience love to see you thinking on your feet.”Those audiences warmed to Slattery’s outrageous patter

3 days ago

Stephen Colbert on Trump’s legal immunity: ‘A president should be bound by the same laws as everyone else’

Late-show hosts talk Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, Donald Trump’s upcoming inauguration and the latest developments with the Los Angeles wildfires.On Tuesday evening, Stephen Colbert celebrated the release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report on Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. “Boom! When people find out what Trump did, his chances of being re-elected two months ago are going to be pretty slim,” The Late Show host quipped.According to Smith’s report, the justice department would have ample evidence to convict Trump, had he not won the election last November. “All true, and you can see it in the new Marvel series What If

3 days ago

Chimney sweep whose death changed child labour laws honoured with blue plaque

An 11-year-old chimney sweep whose death after getting stuck in a flue led to a change in Victorian child labour laws is to become the youngest British person to be honoured with an official blue plaque.George Brewster, a “climbing boy”, died in 1875 after getting jammed while cleaning the inside of a chimney at the County Pauper Lunatic Asylum in Fulbourn near Cambridge.According to a contemporary report in the Cambridge Independent News, George was told by the master sweeper, William Wyer, to remove his clothes and enter a flue measuring 12in by 7.5in. Fifteen minutes after beginning work, George became stuck

3 days ago

technologySee all

;