Behind the Candelabra (2013): Love in Rhinestones

The Story

Scott Thorson (Matt Damon) meets Liberace (Michael Douglas) in 1977, when Thorson is nineteen and Liberace is fifty-seven. He goes backstage after a show. He becomes, in rapid succession, Liberace's companion, his lover, his adopted son (legally, briefly), his pet project — Liberace had Thorson's face surgically altered to look more like a younger version of himself — and, eventually, his discarded ex. They separate in 1982. Liberace died of AIDS in 1987, having denied to the end that he was gay.

The story is extraordinary and Soderbergh does not soften it. The excess is full excess: the mansion, the matching mink coats, the candelabra, the face surgeries, the drugs, the possessiveness, the genuine love and the genuine cruelty that coexisted inside it. The film does not apologise for any of this. It presents it as what it was: a specific human relationship between two specific people, with all the complexity and damage and warmth that implies.

Michael Douglas

Douglas had played gay men before, but nothing like this. His Liberace is a performance of complete commitment — the mannerisms, the voice, the particular quality of Liberace's public persona as it rubbed against and protected his private one — without any distance between actor and character.

The most remarkable aspect of the performance is Douglas's portrayal of Liberace's loneliness. The mansion, the sequins, the performing are all, in Douglas's reading, structures built around an emptiness that Thorson briefly fills. When Liberace looks at Thorson with something that is clearly, genuinely love — before the possessiveness takes over, before the surgery, before the end — Douglas makes that love completely real. You understand why someone would choose this, even knowing what it would cost.

Matt Damon

Damon's Thorson is the more passive of the two characters, which requires a different kind of skill: the ability to hold the centre of a scene while the more flamboyant character orbits around him. His Thorson is young and dazzled and gradually recognising the cost of the world he has entered — the drugs, the surgery, the erasure of his own identity in favour of Liberace's vision of him.

The scene in which Thorson confronts the surgical recovery — seeing his own changed face for the first time — is one of Damon's finest moments. The horror of it, the grief, arrives through what he doesn't say.

The Visual World

Soderbergh shoots the world of Liberace with a production design that pushes past excess into something approaching surrealism: the rooms that contain rooms, the mirrored surfaces that multiply everything, the costumes that read as serious formal wear in the context of Liberace's world. The visual logic of the film is the visual logic of the man — everything amplified, nothing understated, beauty pursued past the point where beauty becomes something else.

The contrast with the scenes of ordinary life — Thorson's background, the moments of genuine domesticity between the two men — is the film's most sustained visual argument.

The Denial

Liberace was, to the end of his life, publicly not gay. He sued journalists who described him as gay. He maintained, in front of audiences who clearly understood the subtext of everything he did, a performance of heterosexual identity that required increasingly baroque misdirection.

The film is compassionate about the denial without endorsing it. It understands, in the context of a career built on the love of audiences who would have been significantly less loving had they been asked to acknowledge what was in front of them, why a man might make the choice Liberace made. It also shows, clearly, what the choice cost him and the people who loved him.

Why It Matters for BoysDo

BoysDo is a platform that treats gay desire as worthy of serious aesthetic attention. *Behind the Candelabra* is a film that treats gay desire as worthy of the full register of human experience: the comedy and the tragedy and the genuine tenderness and the genuine damage that love, any love, produces when it is denied the space to exist openly.

It is also, in its own rhinestoned way, very beautiful. The excess is the point. Sometimes the most honest thing is the most over the top.