Behind the Candelabra

A superbly acted and exquisitely rendered gem.

Michael Douglas is astonishing.... Damon is just as good, somehow convincing us that he's far younger than he is in real life and artfully keeping us guessing about Thorson's true motivation as he worms his way into Liberace's life.

There’s a solid, patient, confident quality to this movie that’s rarely seen in modern mainstream cinema. It’s better than most American films playing in theaters, and better than most of HBO’s films, too.

This doesn't feel like a factory product, but a work of individual, beautiful craftsmanship.

Beautifully written (by Richard LaGravenese) and directed (by Steven Soderbergh), Behind the Candelabra doesn’t quite fit into the biopic genre--simply because it is so good.

Once your eyes adjust to the bedazzled opulence of Liberace's life in '70s and '80s Las Vegas, Behind the Candelabra becomes a darkly moving and provocative look at two lonely men who briefly found something like love before the maelstrom of fame, money and drugs, all churning within the confines of the sexual closet, blew it apart.

Superbly scripted, brilliantly directed, smart but never smarmy and led by a lead performance by Michael Douglas so good you often forget you’re watching an actor rather than the famous character he’s playing, this is a rarity, a fully realized biographical drama shot through with real feeling and an abundance of sly humor.

Looking Music Hall-size glamorous on the big screen, Behind the Candelabra is a TV movie only in its sage, nuanced and closeup concentration on the emotional tensions that bind two people, then break them apart.

Everything is pushed right to the edge, and that it doesn't topple over in a flaming heap is tribute to a pair of brilliant performances--though Damon's is first among equals--and an absorbing production that is morbidly fascinating from start to finish.

Director Steven Soderbergh's Candelabra is one of the smartest, tartest examples I've ever seen of that soupy genre, the Hollywood biopic. [27 May 2013, p.39]

Behind the Candelabra is powerful, funny, and emotionally rigorous, and though it might act as a fiery and forceful resignation, in conjunction with Side Effects, it also serves as an uncommonly heartfelt Dear John letter.

Buffed to a typical HBO high gloss, Candelabra is a visual feast. But it shines brightest in those moments where it captures the rhythms of a relationship in its first blush of affection and its seemingly inevitable collapse.

Half the fun of Behind the Candelabra is watching these two Hollywood heavyweights deftly tackle roles that could have been career-enders not that long ago.

Douglas, Damon and company put on a crowd-pleaser that even Liberace couldn’t top during all those many-splendored stage performances. A film that could have been so very bad turns out to be pretty mah-velous.

If the script can at times seem slight, Douglas and Damon are 
superb.

In other hands, this scenario might have degenerated into a caricature-filled freak show. The fact that it doesn’t is attributable to Soderbergh’s relatively restrained direction and Douglas's and Damon’s intelligently modulated performances.

Director Steven Soderbergh walks a tightrope between camp and class and, if you make it that far, pulls it off.

Yet as inspired as the performances are and as fully realized as the world is, traces of Soderbergh's recent weaknesses remain. For all the insight into Liberace's private life, there's very little insight into the man himself.

Terrific performances make it a movie worth seeing.

No one saves face in director Steven Soderbergh's ghoulishly entertaining, opulently produced Behind the Candelabra, HBO's grandest, gaudiest and most fascinating movie in quite a long while.

Behind the Candelabra, a snapshot from the last decade of the pianist and showman Liberace, is sublimely entertaining.

What’s right with this movie are the performances.

It’s like all the ingredients for a sugar rush of a dessert have been assembled and instead mixed together to make something surprisingly sensible, but not exactly delicious.

Douglas brings real dimension to the role, exploring the difference between the pianist’s on- and offstage personas, grappling with the effects of age on an entertainer and trying to reconcile Liberace’s pattern of attraction to young men with what the pic paints as genuinely paternal feelings. Though its two-hour running time has a tendency to feel like three.

A glossy story of love gone wrong and then (slightly) redeemed at the end, without a whole lot of deep pathos in between.

Behind the Candelabra doesn't really get behind anything; it just rolls around in tacky history.

While Mr. Douglas glides through the film--demonstrating that his talent for portraying carnivorous lechery and polished duplicity works regardless of sexual orientation--and Mr. Damon is earnest and committed, the love, or whatever it was, between Thorson and Liberace never comes into emotional focus.

Behind the Candelabra isn’t a smear job, but it’s not a revelation, either.