This arc allows Damon to go from plump, sulky kid to ruin. That guy stuck around for six years he was loved and fucked by Liberace he had surgery in the effort to look like the hero and in that process he began a descent into drug addiction. There was a real Thorson, and the script by Richard La Gravenese is based on the book Thorson published, which was labeled as a novel. Then, like so many wives, he begins to bore the husband and has to wonder which exit he is meant to use.
Thorson is the character who progresses, from an aimless, star-struck pretty boy to someone who is picked up by Liberace and turned into a wife. Liberace never alters or wavers in the story (until death), but that is often the way of performers who have given up their own lives. But the real triumph of the film is Matt Damon’s Scott Thorson. He may well win prizes, which is fair enough.
To this day, I think, that image has been denied to the world by those who seek to maintain Liberace’s lies and his image.ĭouglas is spectacular he makes a dull story watchable, he plays to the fascination with gossip, and he lets us keep our cool. In that moment, Liberace looks like Robert Blake in David Lynch’s Lost Highway. It is Douglas doing it, but you don’t recognize him (the makeup, headed by Kate Biscoe, is not just an exceptional craft in this film it is close to its thematic nature). The most piercing moment in this film is near the end, and it shows Liberace dying, without his wig, without health or hope, without lies. Liberace died two years after Rock Hudson, in a country invaded by AIDS, yet he tried to fade away on the legend of “heart disease,” admitting nothing of his real condition. There’s also something cruel and selfish in Lee’s face. (If Kirk ever had to tell a lie in a movie, he covered himself immediately with that cocky laugh.) So Michael watches the other people in Lee’s life with interest and appetite he is wry about the gulf between his private life and his public persona he feels possessed by a feeling that the real Liberace never had-“What a poor bastard!”
Whereas Michael Douglas was born and raised in the code that knew an actor had to look honest. But if you look at pictures of the real Wladziu, or Lee, you will find several things missing from this film: Liberace was thick in the face (Douglas has not given up his nearly gaunt handsomeness) his eyes were hard, bright, unseeing, and dishonest. The Liberace Museum in the side streets of Las Vegas closed several years ago, and few people under thirty have much idea of who he was, why he was so popular, or how he has become so dated. Twenty-six years after the piano player’s death, irony may be the only way to make this film. That’s what makes his performance here so attractive and amusing: He stands aside from Liberace as if to say, “Can you believe this guy?” Whereas Liberace did believe in that awful, very uncool guy. If there was ever any feeling that Douglas might be inwardly nervous about playing gay, that can be put to rest. Michael Douglas has a confidence in his own sexuality, and in the power of pretending. By 2013, that effort would be ridiculous, uncool, and vulgar. The most important distinction coming out of that gap is that Douglas, in his eyes and in his voice, is too smart and too knowing to attempt to pretend that Liberace was not gay. He does not look like Wladziu Valentino Liberace (half Polish, half Italian, all show business) he looks like a clever actor pretending to be him. Michael Douglas (whose father was of Russian descent) is a much better actor than he has been given credit for.
Though the film was turned down by every Hollywood movie and relegated to HBO for being “too gay,” if you wonder whether the sex will be tough to take, don’t worry. “Behind the Face” might have been a more suitable name, raising the question of whether there was any there there. Ignore the title: This is not a film about a candelabra, but a very intriguing analysis of the face and what time and surgery can do to it.