Carry on camping

Rating: 8/10 (13 June 2013)

Wow! Camp overdrive. Camp overkill!
You have to remember that Lee Liberace was the most flamboyantly gay entertainer showbiz has ever seen - even though he sued a British newspaper for hinting that he was a tad effeminate and went to his grave protesting his innocence from homosexuality.
The part is a gift to an actor and Michael Douglas sinks his teeth into it with relish. He also sinks his teeth into Matt Damon (who wouldn't!) as Scott Thorsen, Lee's toyboy for six years who even underwent plastic surgery to make him look more like his new "daddy". Liberace was an egomaniac, vain, needy, voraciously sexual and vicious when he didn't get his own way. Thorsen (on whose biography the movie is based) tries to portray himself as both less and more than just a gold-digging opportunist. The screenplay suggests that this mismatched pair may - for a time anyway - have loved each other. Hell had no fury like Lee scorned and Thorsen, like his many predecessors, was moved on as briskly as he was moved in - and with a lot less in 'palimony' than he would get today; Liberace was outlandishly generous but he could also be stingy.
All the kitsch of Mr Showmanship's life is here: the ludicrously furnished homes (Michael Jackson had the same hideous taste); the extravagantly costumed performances. His skill on the piano, however technically accomplished, always seemed like the keyboard equivalent of a drag show - every piece of music as over-decorated as his houses. Michael Douglas captures not just the style, but the very essence of this preening onstage/offstage monster; it seems unfair that because the movie has gone straight to cable TV in the US he will not be eligible for an Oscar.
Matt Damon also clearly enjoys playing against his usual type and is very persuasive as a cocky young man enjoying the luxury of his new life but at the same time stifled by it. Rob Lowe goes gloriously camp as the plastic surgeon to the stars, with hair modelled on Lauren Bacall. Debbie Reynolds is unrecognisable in a cameo as Lee's money-grubbing momma - they should have built her part up more.
This is the cruelest as well as the campest biopic since MOMMIE DEAREST. If this is director Steven Soderbergh's 'swansong', as he has promised, he's going out on a high. Everybody involved in this production pays pitch-perfect 'homage' to the over-the-top phenomenon that was Lee Liberace. Freddie Mercury and Elton John don't come close, though perhaps Quentin Crisp did. Liberace managed to be a gay version of both Frankenstein and the Creature!