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" Behind the Candelabra is supposedly, though I refuse to believe it, Steven Soderbergh&amp;#039;s last film. He could do worse than to leave on such a high note \u2014 such a touching and strange look at love, such an odd meditation on the nature of illusion and show business. Whenever you think about Liberace, you think about the clothes. And the costumes in Behind the Candelabra, which premieres Sunday on HBO, are gloriously over-the-top. They make the bling of any celebrity today look positively restrained. The late seventies really were the apogee of excess, and those years look utterly ridiculous when recreated in detail. What&amp;#039;s surprising about Behind the Candelabra, however, is that it makes you forget about the clothes. The characters are so humanely rendered \u2014 their pain and their joy so vivid \u2014 that the bizarre surroundings of their story fall away. The surroundings are bizarre, it has to be said. Liberace between 1979 and 1984 was show business at its showiest. He had coats that cost more than people&amp;#039;s houses. He covered his hands in rings made out of coins. He had a driver (often a lover) drive him on stage in a gold-plated Rolls Royce. Behind the Candelabra focuses on the relationship with one of his many gay lovers who doubled as a handler and helpmeet and a replacement family, Scott Thurson. And their relationship is weird, there&amp;#039;s no doubt about it. The details are juicy and somewhat disturbing. Liberace gets himself a facelift that makes it impossible for him to close his eyes. He also has Scott undergo a series of plastic surgeries which make him look sort of like a young Liberace. (The surgeon is played by a deliciously scummy Rob Lowe.) Then there is the business of wanting to adopt his much younger lover as a son \u2014 to be father and lover to him at once. The creepiness is enhanced by the matching outfits they wear, as if Liberace were trying to become and to make love to his younger self at the same time. Michael Douglas and Matt Damon are both superb in these fantastic and grotesque situations, turning in some of the best performances of their careers.  They are also wonderfully understated. The trick with Behind the Candelabra is that all the creepiness, and all the wild costumes, and the extravagant sets serve a perfectly ordinary love story, a typical romance that anyone can relate to. Two people meet each other. They fall in love. They are happy. Then they try everything they can to keep their relationship in its state of original bliss, and their attempts \u2014 the surgeries, the drugs, the open relationships \u2014 tragically lead to them breaking up. The breakup is ugly and all anybody is left with at the end, after a hastily arranged attempt at redemption, are some beautiful memories. The story in Behind the Candelabra is not that different from the story in Annie Hall, just with raccoon coats and statuettes. You&amp;#039;ve probably been through it yourself. Almost everyone has.  Which leads to the question: What&amp;#039;s with all the clothes? Liberace is the most famous example of campiness ever to exist, and this movie shows exactly how torturous and how elaborate that aesthetic posture was. &amp;quot;Camp sees everything in quotation marks,&amp;quot; Susan Sontag wrote in her famous essay on the subject. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not a lamp, but a &amp;#039;lamp&amp;#039;; not a woman, but a &amp;#039;woman.&amp;#039; To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.&amp;quot; Liberace was that &amp;quot;farthest extension&amp;quot; into life as theater who ever lived. His camp was both fun and agony. It is almost impossible, now, to imagine a world in which Liberace could claim to be straight for most of his life, and remain in the closet until his death. (His manager claimed that his death from AIDS was really a consequence of the anemia brought on from a watermelon diet.) Amazingly, his fans, and more importantly his mother, apparently believed him. It&amp;#039;s shocking to think I was alive during such a time.  By showing the simple love story in the middle of all the sequins, Soderbergh has made a powerful statement about the tortures of living in the closet. It becomes clear that all the glitter is really camouflage, that all the performance on Liberace&amp;#039;s part is a desperate attempt to be himself while hiding himself. The despair of loving secretly is made painfully, movingly real. We think we live in more enlightened times. Even a neanderthal like Rush Limbaugh has said that the debate about gay marriage &amp;quot;is over.&amp;quot; And yet gay men are being hunted on the streets of New York as I write this and it was only a month ago that the first active professional athlete in a major American sport in history came out as gay. Clearly &amp;quot;over&amp;quot; in this context means there&amp;#039;s still a long way to go. Behind the Candelabra shows us exactly why we have to keep going as fast as we can. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a22747/behind-the-candelabra-review/>