The main draw was that this was something of a passion project for many of the people involved. Director Steven Soderbergh has been talking about his intent to retire from filmmaking soon, but seems to keep finding "one more movie" to make. It does suggest that any movie he's making at this point had something fairly compelling about it on the script page that might make it worth a look. His Liberace film has been in the works for long enough that he secured his two stars, Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, years ago, and both were actively talking up how they looked forward to making the movie.
What Soderbergh wasn't able to secure in all that time was a studio. He reportedly shopped the film around to every major studio in Hollywood, and was turned down by all of them. No one wanted to make a film that was that "gay," was the story, until he turned to HBO. So what was conceived of as an Oscar bait bio movie wound up a big ratings draw on HBO.
The movie does manage to negotiate some of the flaws I perceive in the average biography film. Usually, these films suffer for not really having a narrative throughline. The movie wants to tell you the entire life story of the subject, show you adversity and triumph, and wrap the whole thing up in an ending that (if you know anything about the subject of the film) you already know. Behind the Candelabra manages to generate a bit more interest by really being a film about Liberace's lover Scott, Matt Damon's character, rather than about the man himself. The film picks up with Liberace already a celebrated sensation, and we follow this young man's slow entrapment in the web rather than the celebrity's rise to stardom. That said, you still know exactly where the story is going. Whether you know about the end of Liberace's life or not, you can tell how Scott's story will end right from the opening minutes of the film. And there's really nothing that compelling about this "slow descent" film to separate it from the many others like it.
But there are some good performances. Michael Douglas is an excellent Liberace. He manages to channel the real man credibly without making it seem like an impersonation, and he manages to play a man who embodied the flamboyant gay stereotype while still seeming like a real person. Matt Damon is also excellent as Scott. You'd probably think him far too old to play a role like this, but he portrays the young man's early naivete so believably that you never question it. There are also great supporting roles played by Dan Aykroyd, Scott Bakula, and Rob Lowe.
Had this actually been released on the big screen, though, the person most deserving of an Academy Award would have been the makeup artist. The work here is absolutely superb. Both of the main actors are playing people younger than their actual age, and the work done to make them look younger is absolutely undetectable. On the other end of the spectrum, there's much showier makeup work too. Rob Lowe's character is a smarmy plastic surgeon whose own face has been contorted into an absolute freak show. The work done on Lowe in the film is genius, because the actor remains totally recognizable, while still managing to look like he's been in some horrible kind of accident. Similarly effective work is then done on Matt Damon in the second half of the film, to depict his character after the surgeries Liberace made him undergo. Brilliant, brilliant work.
But the movie itself, despite the good performances, is still simple paint-by-numbers fare. My attention waned several times throughout, and by the end I really hadn't seen whatever it was that had captured Steven Soderbergh's imagination. I give the movie a C+.
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