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There's
never been a rock-'n'-roll picture quite like Velvet Goldmine, a
big, bright roman candle of a movie that sends ideas flaring in
all directions. It centers on Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers),
a Bowie-like British rock star whose career collapses after he fakes
his own assassination during a 1974 concert in London. Ten years
later, a newspaper wants an article on "Whatever Happened to Brain
Slade," and the assignment goes to English journalist Arthur Stuart
(Christian Bale), a rabid fan whose youth was profoundly transformed
by Slade's gender-bending music. As Stuart interviews the stars
old cronies (a la Citizen Kane), we're given flashbacks of Slade's
life-his bisexuality and drug use, his uneasy marriage to a Yank
expat (Toni Collette), and his homoerotic worship of an Iggy Pop-ish
rocker named Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor). Yet the more we see of the
enigmatic Slade, the more we grasp that the real story isn't his
incandescent career. It's the rise and fall of the glam-rock era
itself, a utopian moment when sexual identity grew fluid, personal
freedom appeared boundless, and people revealed who they really
were by the masks they chose to wear.
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Velvet
Goldmine was written and directed by Todd Haynes, the most reliably
audacious filmmaker working in America today. At a time when most
"indepenent" directors can't wait to book a seat on the Hollywood
gravy train, he keeps trying to bring the avant-garde into the multiplex.
Whether he's using Barbie dolls to tell the story of Karen Carpenter
in Superstar or exploring environmental illness in Safe, Haynes
is always looking for ways to subvert our expectations. Although
this new movie is officially about the seventies rock scene in London,
it begins in outer space, features a cameo by Oscar Wilde (who cheekily
declares his desire to be a pop star), and winds up as a bleak portrait
of Ronald Reagan's America. A true filmaker of ideas, Haynes uses
Stuart's quest for Brian Slade as a way to explore sexual identity,
the history of gay culture, the manufacture of stardom, the honesty
of artifice, and the life-enhancing value of pop stars who may ultimately
betray their fan's good faith.
While
Velvet Goldmine is the year's brainiest picture, what grabs you
first is its sheer joy in spectacle. Haynes clearly adores glam
rock's flamboyance and uses his movie to celebrate seventies high
style. He gives us platform heel and faces painted with glitter.
He gives us hairdos the color of tropical fruits and silvery costumes
that sprout iridescent plumage. He gives us men dressed as women,
women dressed as men, and musical numbers so deliriously gaudy they're
like a Hello Dolly! revival in Oz. Showering us with songs and colors
and Brechtian high jinks, Haynes wants us to understand the giddy,
rule-breaking magic of the glam scene.
But while
the movie's always a joy to watch (it's extremely well shot by Maryse
Alberti), the story itself is often cold and abstract-too aware
of its intellectual meaning. Haynes never takes us inside the juicy
passions that drive his characters. The camera lingers on Rhys Meyer's
sinister, pouting beauty as Slade, but we never feel the singer's
inner excitement as he slips into high heels, seduces the crowd,
or slides into bed with whoever suits him; we understand how glam
helps Stuart discover his own gayness, but we don't share his quivering
thrill as he sees his own forbidden longings enacted onstage. Nor
does the movie fully capture rock-'n'-roll's visceral power. Although
handsomely mounted, the music sequences are so studied that I began
longing for the rude, bacchanalian energy that Oliver Stone brought
to The Doors. Such primal excitement happens here only once, when
Curt Wild pulls his pants down and dives through flames into the
roaring crowd. McGregor's orgasmic performance reminds us, for the
firsttime since Trainspotting, why he's one of the world's hottest
young actors.
For all
its playful panache, Velvet Goldmine is about something serious:
the liberating potential of pop culture. Haynes wants us to see
how a movement like glam rock can tear through suffocating traditions
and offer its fans a doorway to new ways of living. He'd clearly
like his movie to do the same thing for the nineties audience-to
make us see art, style, and sexuality in a radically different way.
This is a lofy goal, and not surprisingly, it leads him to cram
too many ideas into a single film. He introduces a key character,
a dandyish clubber named Jack Fairy. Then drops him halway through;
he self-consciously mimics the structure of Citizen Kane but can't
deliver a Rosebud; he stages so many musical numbers, they start
to swamp the characters. Such rough edges make the movie feel slighty
unfinished, yet they're offshoots of its willingness to take huge
artistic risks. Velvet Goldmine is too ambitious for its own good
(and its own limited budget), but in the year of Armageddon and
There's Something About Mary, I won't fault Todd Haynes for aiming
too high.
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