Steven Soderbergh’s TV film honours the master pianist in the only appropriate way: with lurid spectacle
e, 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.
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 , 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.
Matt Damon as the ‘extravagantly eyelinered’ Scott Thorson, Liberace’s live-in lover turned chauffeur.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.
A ‘wonderfully stiff’ Rob Lowe intensifies the psychosexual drama – as a plastic surgeon who grafts Liberace’s features on to Thorson.“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 , Liberace casually requests that his adoptive son undergo a transformation to look just like his father.
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