*** (out of ****)
Starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Ewan MacGregor, Toni Collette, Eddie Izzard, and Christian Bale
Directed by Todd Haynes & written by Haynes and James Lyons
1998
124 min R
How best to describe “Velvet Goldmine?” How about as an incredibly gay history of the glam rock era that subverts conventional narrative in favor of feeling like one of those pretentious “concept” rock albums in which every song follows a single loose, impressionistic story? Dialogue and voiceover sound like song lyrics and many of the movie’s incidences play like rock songs: gloss, surface, and mood, but not much in the way of traditional “depth.”
And I don’t mean “incredibly gay” as a statement of quality. No, more than being about any of its characters, “Velvet Goldmine” is about being gay in the 1970s, and about how glam rockers like Queen, Bowie, and Elton John facilitated that through their gender-bending and by hiding revelation beneath bottomless layers of irony. “That’s me! That’s me!” shrieks the movie’s star-struck young narrator (Christian Bale) to his parents, pointing at the bisexual rock star (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) on the telly.
Bale begins the movie as a dazzled fan, then tells most of the movie in flashback as a jaded reporter ten years later. Along the way, he deconstructs the glamour of rock, how during that brief period in our teens we honestly believe these strangers are intimate with us. He eventually cuts through it all and doesn’t come to meet the truth of a particular rock star, but of all rock stars. As such, the characters are mostly ciphers: we never get to know Rhys-Meyers’s Brian Slade (or his alter-ego Maxwell Demon) in the regular sense. We do know his chief lovers a little better, including his wife Toni Collette, who is almost as pretty as the boys, and the anachronistically Cobain-esque longhair Ewan MacGregor.
Because the movie is about not knowing people more than knowing them, writer-director Todd Haynes consciously mimics “Citizen Kane:” the room of reporters watches news footage early; the lone reporter quests for the truth; he meets with the wife in a bar; he interviews the old man in the wheelchair; and, of course, timelines overlap, reaching the end, then starting over again. The original songs are utterly believable as genuine articles from the glam rock era, which is, to say, overly-wordy crap. I’ve never felt any connection to glam rock, but more to what the characters call “peace and love hypocrisy,” which petered out with The Doors, and against which glam rebelled. Then my interest in rock music comes back in with The Sex Pistols and The Clash.
The movie is a little on the long side when it comes to all the concert footage, which finds our star studs in gloriously tacky costumes and situations. Haynes is an electric director here, far more athletic than in “Far From Heaven,” and his color barrage is as exciting as it is brazen—he uses so many zooms you expect Clint Eastwood to shoot someone at any moment. “Velvet Goldmine” is also an unapologetic celebration of male bodies skinny, young, and hairless. It’s the role Rhys-Meyers (“Match Point”) was born to play—a perpetual two-hour prance with a contemptuous come-hither look on his face. But it’s not as much fun as De Palma’s glam rock opera “Phantom of the Paradise.”
Finished Monday, October 16th, 2006
Copyright © 2006 Friday & Saturday Night
Back to home.