Recently, Steven Soderbergh spoke -- or maybe ranted
would be more appropriate -- at the San Francisco International Film
Festival regarding the current state of cinema. He began by defining movies vs. cinema:
A movie is something you see, and cinema is something that’s made … Cinema is a specificity of vision. It’s an approach in which everything matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t exist in anything like this form.
Given
the current state of cinema -- one in which studios are increasingly
driven by fear or greed, or both -- Soderbergh’s poignant, courageous,
and striking story of flamboyant Vegas pianist Lee Liberace and his
young lover, Scott Thorson, deserves to be recognized as a defining
piece of cinema not just in Soderbergh’s repertoire, but in the current
cinematic landscape.
Already, rumors -- some may call them conspiracy theories -- have arisen that claim Candelabra was
only picked up by HBO because it was deemed “too gay” for widespread
studio release. This stance really doesn’t sound too outrageous; but it
also sounds like a cheap ploy to deflect blame for the inability to
recognize talent after the fact. It’s the equivalent of saying, “I let
you win even though I could’ve won anytime I wanted to.”
Homosexuality
in Hollywood is like racism -- they are topics which lead people to
conclusions based on political bias as opposed to artistic merit.
Indeed, in a business wherein universal appeal is king and submission,
uniformity, and impersonality are valued,
divisive topics such as homosexuality are surely extinguished long
before they have a chance to attract undue attention. This is unfair to
any story even remotely controversial, any story that even hints at
stirring the status quo of society. Never mind the fact that the most
important stories are the ones which inspire conversation -- even
argument -- as a means to reflect humanity’s most pressing questions,
issues, and weaknesses. No, for the studio executive looking for the
next Transformers or Avengers franchise, simply pass on any works of art that dares to show any interest in or curiosity about relationships.
The great irony in Candelabra’s struggle to find a distributor lies in the fact that the film isn’t
inherently about gay love. Unlike racially driven films such as The Blind Side or The Help -- stories in which the taboo topic at play inherently drives the conflict of the entire film -- Candelabra doesn’t
find its conflict in its homosexual characters. In fact, it shows a
great deal of sympathy for Liberace and Scott, even when they behave
ignorantly and selfishly. Indeed, Matt Zoller Seitz notes,
Soderbergh and LaGravanese have taken the most retrograde material imaginable — this world is in some ways a homophobe’s fantasy of what it’s like to be gay, creative, and rich — and treated it as another set of storytelling circumstances. This film about two gay men, one much older and richer than the other, is not explaining anything or apologizing for anything or putting anything in politically correct context. It’s saying, “Here is what happened, and here are the people involved, and here is how they thought and felt about it.” Period.
I
admire Soderbergh for his courage. He’s a man of limitless potential, a
man capable of tackling any interest and crafting it into something
unique. And if Soderbergh is truly retiring from feature-film-making, Candelabra seems to be an apt project with which to bow out. Beyond all the shimmering lights and gossamer fancy, Candelabra is
a tale of a performer -- a man whose stage persona hides a self-pitying
vanity, a character whose insecurities and selfish demands are obscured
only by his own garish taste in extremes and obsession with
trivialities. It seems fitting that Soderbergh would end his feature-film career exploring the superficial facades and fleeting importance of the
entertainment industry.
At
the end of his lecture in San Francisco, Soderbergh gave pause to the
idea that cinema is dying, that cynicism and greed will continue to run
rampant throughout Hollywood. Indeed, he still believes that good,
meaningful, important works of art will continue. One simply needs to
hope for the best:
The other thing I tell young filmmakers is when you get going and you try to get money, when you’re going into one of those rooms to try and convince somebody to make it, I don’t care who you’re pitching, I don’t care what you’re pitching – it can be about genocide, it can be about child killers, it can be about the worst kind of criminal injustice that you can imagine – but as you’re sort of in the process of telling this story, stop yourself in the middle of a sentence and act like you’re having an epiphany, and say: You know what, at the end of this day, this is a movie about hope.
