glorious mess, noble effort

Rating: 8/10 (8 November 1998)

Given that I've come to view the arrival of a new Todd Haynes film as more of a full-blown 'event' than the average trip to the movies, I half expected "Velvet Goldmine", Haynes' sprawling ode to Glitter Rock, to be a set-up for disappointment. Not so...while the film is certainly problematic at points, it's still a pretty damn terrific retina-burn, and succeeds at what all of Haynes' previous work has. Namely, showing us pictures absolutely unlike any we've seen before, and eliciting entirely unexpected emotional reactions from them. The short-lived phenom of Glitter, or glam rock, was defined by its excessive theatricality, overtly camp orchestrations of performance and dentity artifice, and a deliberate push for construct over any real notions of truth. Haynes exuberantly and exhaustively adopts this thesis as a sylistic springboard for the film, presenting an mythologized fantasy amalgam instead of even remotely attempting an accurate depiction of actual figures and events. "Goldmine" opens with fairy-tale voiceover narration detailing the arrival of Oscar Wilde to England from outer space and a child's walk into a Maxfield Parrish sunset backdrop, on the other side of which lies London 1974 and the elaborately coiffed progeny of the extra-terrestrial Wilde cavorting in the streets to Brian Eno on their way to a concert by glam megastar Brian Slade (a porcelain Jonathan Rhys Meyers playing an obvious David Bowie knockoff ca. Ziggy Stardust, here given the rather Pynchonesque name of Maxwell Demon). Slade is murdered onstage, and the setting jumps to NYC 1984, where journalist and former glitter fanboy Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) is assigned an anniversary story, and the chance to find out what may have really happened to Slade, while uncovering some of his own repressed memories on the way. Stuart's investigation mimics the structure of "Citizen Kane", sometimes shot-for-shot ("Kane" is only one film reference of many here...Haynes resurrects the Barbie dolls from his own wonderful "Superstar" as well as the film-rupture from "Persona", he names one of the rock groups 'Flaming Creatures' in homage to Jack Smith, and several entire sequences land dead-center in what's definitely Ken Russell territory), allowing Slade's trajectory to icon-dom, as well as Stuart's own discovery of his sexual identity, to gradually emerge in flashback. Haynes readily admits that this narrative is largely a concession, a hook to draw the viewer into reconsidering the era as a whole, with its celebration of hype, image and consumerism and its challenging of cultural constructs and, most importantly perhaps, sexual mores. Haynes makes Stuart the emotional center of the film, and his sexual self-discovery, and gradual full-circle acknowledgement gives some grounding to the pastiche (Bale has an acute moment of lucid identification, pointing at a TV screen when Slade is on and repeating to his confused parents "That's Me! That's Me!"), and makes this probably his most personal film since "Dottie Gets Spanked". It's also, strangely enough, his brightest and most joyful piece to date, not that the Slade story isn't without its fair share of pain, but it's of a rather formulaic 'ravages of fame' sort and hardly as intriguing as Stuart's development. Unfortunately, Haynes allows Stuart's investigation to degenerate into nonsense and brings the opulence and artifice of Slade's world to the fore. But that opulence and artifice is rather astounding...the costumes by old Derek Jarman associate Sandy Powell and former Scratch Orchestra member and Eno contemporary Christopher Hobbs' production design are consistently surprising, and Haynes somehow manages to make his relatively tiny budget seem to triple itself onscreen. And, of course, his infectuous enthusiasm for the music is the heart of the picture, suffusing virtually every frame (this is the only picture I've ever seen that accurately depicts the transcendentally pleasurable experience of bringing home new vinyl) either in the background, during concert scenes, in fantasy numbers, or, in the grand Hollywood tradition, when characters arbitrarily burst into song at inopportune moments to each other. A feral Ewan McGregor churns through "TV Eye" and lip-synchs "Satellite of Love" in an airborne convertable. Meyers does "Baby on Fire" justice, and performs scads of new songs written for the film which cleverly ape both the sound of the old songs and their endearing ineptitude. There's energy to spare here, and Haynes to a degree crumbles under its overwhelming weight. The disparate elements are never given a chance to properly coelesce and some ideas are more than a little confusing. Still, it's a welcome opportunity for Haynes, bless his soul, to make a picture that could almost be called 'commercial', and for him to subvert that label in his own inimitable and increasingly important fashion.