Mother love

Rating: 5/10 (14 February 2017)

It seems bizarre that many people thought Liberace was camp but did not think he was gay.
As a young child when his television specials were shown I was aware that there was something effeminate about him even though I had no idea what homosexuality was. He even would have a female companion in these shows, a wink at the audience that he might be straight.
Behind the Candelabra is a film from Steven Soderbergh with Michael Douglas playing the entertainer as a reptilian predator of young men. Preening, vain, bejewelled, promiscuous and yet empty. A bit like the top of his head when he took off his toupee.
Matt Damon plays his teenage lover Scott Thorson, who is taken by a friend to see Liberace's Las Vegas show and then backstage is bemused by the attention lavished on him by the older star who showers him with gifts and love and eventually ejects him with little dignity as a newer, younger model enters the scene.
Of course the film is based on the book by Thorson whose own veracity has been questioned and whose account might be self serving. It is not helped that although Damon looks buff in the disco infused late 1970s era, at the age of 43 when this film was made, he was frankly too old to be playing the teenage Scott Thorson.
Douglas who for a period was a sex symbol with sex thrillers such as Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct is having a hoot camping it up as Liberace, not afraid to show his vulnerable side. Ultimately the only person he had a real relationship with was his mother played here by Debbie Reynolds.
I found the whole drama too shallow and maybe even too safe. After all there is nothing here we have not seen here before. It is just that the gold digger would normally be a young woman who is the plaything of a successful older man.