All That Glitters
VELVET GOLDMINE
A glam-rock retro tribute is also a moving personal drama
With Ewan McGregor, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Christian Bale
Written & directed by Todd Haynes
IN MOVIES AND MUSIC and even television, the '70s have become a gold mine lately for nostalgic pop-cult revivalism. You might even think of the whole Clinton mess as a throwback to the bittersweet fun of the Nixon days. But no one has done the '70s quite so imaginatively as Todd Haynes, whose new movie is mostly a kaleidoscopic tribute to glam rockers like David Bowie and Roxy Music, but also a surprisingly poignant tale of sexual awakening.
There's almost too much to assimilate in Velvet Goldmine, from its stardust memories of rock-star androgynes, to its range of styles, tones, moods and references to cultural landmarks as different as Citizen Kane, A Clockwork Orange and the Beatles. Haynes has been fascinated with fame and tragedy since he used Barbie dolls more than a decade ago to make Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a movie that was banned because he didn't bother to get permission to use the Carpenters' music.
But now he's done everything legally, and the result is a spectacular entertainment that's smart, touching and very (almost too) self-aware.
There's lots of dissonant '70s rock music in Velvet Goldmine, and many scenes that swirl around concert halls, nightclubs, cabarets and mod salons, where sexually fluid people of all ages and genders fawn over one another, and especially over slender young men in feathers and skin-tight raiment. Haynes recreates a rarefied underground world that for a brief time saw the light of day. His movie is a gay-tinted Boogie Nights, a story about what happened to the "other sex" during a time of frantic liberation and earthy delight.
Velvet Goldmine bounces back and forth between five decades and three central characters whose lives intertwine. Just to make it more bizarre, it opens briefly in the 19th century, where the camera descends from the stars and through the clouds to stop at a lovely old London home, where a spacecraft seems to have left a baby on the doorstep. The child grows up to be Oscar Wilde, who as a mop-haired lad in grade school declares: "I want to be a pop idol." (Q.E.D.)
Cut to the 1950s, a century after meeting little Oscar, where we meet little Jack Fairy, who discovers his true nature when he smears on some red lipstick and admires himself in the mirror. By the late '60s Jack has become a cultural touchstone: the first musical act to traverse the barrier that separates and defines men and women.
But Jack is a mere catalyst for our true hero: Brian Slade, a British lad who becomes a '70s rock star by refining Jack Fairy's breakthrough flamboyance. Early in his career, Brian (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) performs a power ballad wearing a frock before a jeering cockney audience. He marries an American girl (Toni Collette of Muriel's Wedding), and then declares at a press conference that he likes boys as much as he likes girls. One reporter walks out. But young fans everywhere embrace his liberating gesture, and they catapult his glittery, silver-and-day-glo panache to international fame.
Meanwhile, in America, there's Curt Wild, a "shipwreck of the streets" who grew up in a Michigan trailer park and got caught, at age 13, giving sex to his brother in the bathroom. Curt (Ewan McGregor) is now a filthy rock star who strips naked on stage and wags it at the audience. Eventually Brian (on the rise) and Curt (descending fast) become lovers.
Then, in the boldest move ever conceived by a rock star, Brian Slade has himself assassinated in the middle of a performance. The world doesn't learn it was a hoax until a full week later.
That was in 1984. Now it's the '90s, and an American magazine has assigned Arthur (Cristian Bale), its token young British writer, to find out what ever happened to Slade, who disappeared from the music scene when fans rebelled against his murderous publicity stunt.
As Arthur ferrets out the life of Brian since his fall from grace, Haynes structures the movie as a series of reminiscences, like Orson Welles did in Citizen Kane. (His constant borrowing from Welles is an inside joke for the cinematically well-versed.) Sometimes Velvet Goldmine is fantastic or surreal. Then it's a '60s Beatles movie, or a homage to the classics, or cinema verité with its jittery documentary look. It even has touches of pretentious artiness, like Haynes' last two dreary films, Poison and Safe.
But in Velvet Goldmine, Haynes grandly breaks through to find a distinctive vision that mixes piquant entertainment with relevant ideas. He directs his movie furiously well, virtually daring you to follow its myriad threads.
If this all sounds like a postmodern treatise on excess and celebrity--well, it certainly is. Haynes laces his script with maxims about art, artists and audiences, weaving his most pregnant lines into the fabric of his complex tapestry. But it's Brian, in blue eye shadow and a dowdy dress, who says it most simply: "The music is the mask. Rock 'n' roll is a prostitute. It should be tarted up."
What's most surprising among all this glimmer and flash is how tenderly Haynes handles his themes of repression, confusion and sexual awakening. Curt and Brian may be liberated, but you could hardly say they understand themselves or their desires. That role is left to the enigmatic Arthur, whose secret life unfolds in flashback along with everything else: As a teenager he idolizes Brian Slade and masturbates to his image, and as an adult he--but no, that would be telling.
Let's just say that amidst the very public story of Brian Slade's rise and fall, we also watch the more intimate story of Arthur's self-discovery, which is still taking place when the movie gently ends, and which might be where Haynes picks up next time.