This
film doesn't try to cover all the bases--it tries to cover more
than there are. Todd Haynes's movie
tells the story of a legendary glam rock star from the 1970's,
Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), who disappears after faking
his own killing during a performance. Told mainly from the point
of view of a young British reporter, Arthur Stuart (Christian
Bale), now living in New York who had been one of Brian's devoted
followers and who tries to find out what happened to him after
his fall from pop grace, the film makes an extensive use of
flashbacks in a way that recalls both Orson Welles' Citizen
Kane and his later, more sinister Mr. Arkadin. But
when Haynes mixes up this already dislocated story line with
lyrical digressions like something out of an experimental film
from the 1950's by Kenneth Anger or Gregory Markopoulos and adds
a heavy dose of sexual politics, the result is a picture that
often seems on the verge of shattering into a myriad of
glittering fragments.
The Velvet Goldmine is a highly polarized film,
caught not only between experimentation and traditional narrative
film making, but between roman à clef and
fable. Both of the two main
characters, Brian and the American Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor),
seem to be pastiches of "real" rock stars, the former
of David Bowie and the late Marc Bolan of T-Rex, the latter of
the Doors' Jim Morrison and Iggy Pop or Lou Reed. At the same
time, Haynes puts the two into all kinds of baroque sequences
with only the slightest plot motivations, sequences which are
apparently intended to use glam rock as a metaphor about pop
culture or the human condition or God only knows what. An even
more extreme swerve into the fabulistic occurs when the audience
learns through a flashback that Curt as a child had been forcibly
subjected to shock treatment by his parents after they found him
having sex with his older brother. But a bizarre episode like
this which could have come straight out of Haynes's first movie,
the quasi-surrealistic Poison, doesn't fit in at all with
the realistic tone of other sequences with their location footage
of New York and London. Given the film's inability to find a
unified tone, what is best about The Velvet Goldmine is
largely incidental, particularly some of the musical sequences
like the one in which Brian and Curt stalk each other on stage
like a pair of tomcats about to get into a fight. Otherwise, the
performances--but especially Christian Bale as the reporter--are
the movie's strong point.
I would be tempted to
describe The Velvet Goldmine in part as Minnelli run amok were
the phrase not already pleonastic.
Minnelli at his best was always a little amok. But Minnelli was
never confused about what he was doing: MGM was the center of his
universe and artifice his stock in trade. Although the early
Warner Bros.-Busby Berkeley musicals often had gutsy plots about
chorines on the make and hoofers trying to make the big time, the
genre had only slight ties with the conventions of realistic
drama and Minnelli pushed it farther into the direction of fable
than anyone ever had before. Haynes, by contrast, can't decide
whether he wants to fabulistically glorify glam rock in all its
excess as an androgynous gesture of liberation or realistically
satirize it as a pure sell-out to the public's hankering after
sensation--and this uncertainty is reflected in the film's
stylistic incoherence. One of the film's best scenes effectively
dramatizes the split through an exchange which takes place
between Arthur Stuart and Curt Wild, who encounter one another
after many years in a bar in New York. To Curt's observation that
"We set out to change the world and only changed
ourselves," Arthur responds, "What's wrong with
that?" To which Curt retorts "Nothing…as long as
you don't look at the world." In all likelihood, Minnelli
thought that Central Park or turn of the century St. Louis as
re-created--not simply reproduced or replicated--on a studio
sound stage was superior to its "real" prototype, but
it would be difficult to subscribe to this aesthetic today
without simultaneously endorsing the enormous quantity of
deception that is intrinsic to the functioning of advanced
capitalism. Yet if Minnelli's mise-en-scène often resembled
advertising art, he carried it so far that the gaudy colors and
elegant props reclaim the sensuous appeal that was forfeited to
the profit motive in the marketplace. In that sense, there is far
more "liberation" in An American in Paris or The
Bandwagon than there is anywhere in The Velvet Goldmine,
just as there is more happiness in the musical quote from Così
fan tutte than anywhere else in the endless desert of Happiness.
The Velvet Goldmine is nearly a
textbook example of Harold Bloom's belatedness, doubly so. It
looks back to the 1970's already as if it were the legendary
past, and beyond that it looks back to the era of great studio
musicals--which evidently themselves had an influence on the rock
scene which the movie depicts--but without being able to
recapture or otherwise come to terms with either of these pasts. However, in this respect--and not
only in it--The Velvet Goldmine is a far more problematic work
than Happiness.
It would be possible to imagine a more polished version of of
Solondz' film--for example, one directed by someone like Sidney
Lumet who is a specialist in realistic drama and a gifted
director of actors--but to imagine Happiness as a
"great" motion picture would involve imagining its
total transformation into a different kind of movie. By its
ambitions, The Velvet Goldmine exposes basic aesthetic
problems which could not simply be remedied--by the work of a
more experienced director--but only resolved on a different
plane. Whether Haynes is capable of tackling those
problems--whether he is aware of them, for that matter--still
remains to be seen. The film will probably give him a chance at
bigger projects but I hope he doesn't end up doing a shot for
shot remake of The Ziegfield Follies. The Velvet
Goldmine is a failure, but its failure is more interesting
than the success of Happiness, which takes few risks apart
from its subject matter. The video is a Miramax Home
Entertainment release which has been re-formatted and which does
not always manage to accurately reproduce the neon hues of the
movie, also photographed by Maryse Alberti and designed by
Christopher Hobbs.