Douglas is a revelation in this role

Rating: Null/10 (1 January 2014)

Wladziu Valentino Liberace, known to the world simply by his Italian surname, by friends as Lee and by his family as Walter, was a genuinely talented and immensely flamboyant entertainer whose trademark was a candelabra on his grand piano but, behind his public persona, he was a rampant homosexual who seduced a series of younger men who became ornaments in his homes of "palatial kitsch". Director Steven Soderbergh has insisted that this bio-pic of Liberace is his final act, but is it a television movie or a theatrical film? The answer is both. Soderbergh claims that no Hollywood studio would finance such a revelatory and intimate portrait and therefore he made the work for America's HBO television network but, outside the United States, it has been shown in cinemas.
One can perhaps understand, if not excuse, Hollywood's sensitivities since this is a remarkably frank, if generally sympathetic, portrayal, not least sexually (although little is actually seen). It is based on a memoir written by Scott Thorsen who met Liberace when the entertainer was 58 and spent five years in a relationship with him before a bitter break-up and the pianist's death from AIDS aged 67. Michael Douglas is brilliant as Liberace, utterly convincing as a man with all the riches he could want but desperate for true companionship and love. Matt Damon is impressive in the difficult support role and there are cameos from some surprising and barely recognisable stars: Rob Lowe, Dan Ackroyd and Debbie Reynolds.
Liberace's love for Thorson was a strange and suffocating affair in which the performer required his young companion to undergo facial surgery to make him look like an earlier version of himself and take drugs to keep him slim, all the while confined to a gilded cage which required him to give all of his space, time, and dignity. So this is ultimately a profoundly sad work, not necessarily recommended for a New Year's Eve iTunes download (which is how we viewed it with friends) by definitely well worth seeing.