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By Joe Baltake
Bee Movie Critic
Rating: Three and a half stars
Todd Haynes, perhaps the most singular of today's young filmmakers, is a contradiction in progress. He's a movie fantasist, not unlike someone such as Tim Burton or Joe Dante, but instead of making jokey comedies or loopy adventure films, Haynes specializes in art-house/message films. From his first film, the suppressed "Superstar," an unauthorized biopic in which a Barbie doll played the late Karen Carpenter, to his omnibus film, "Poison" (based on stories by Jean Genet), and "Safe" (in which Julianne Moore starred as a housewife allergic to the environment), Haynes has carved out a niche for himself, making the kind of bracing films that no one else does. "Velvet Goldmine," his latest, comes with the same brand of controlled craziness that has motivated his other features, but this one is much more ambitious, with a bigger budget and more glitz to make his strange pop-mythological fantasies all the more dazzling. Structured as an investigative piece along the lines of Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" but visually closer to Ken Russell's biographies of composers ("The Music Lovers," "Mahler" and "Litsztomania"), "Velvet Goldmine" takes on the rock-opera form as it revivifies the sights and sounds of Britain's glam rock era. It projects us back to the 1970s when costumed, sexually ambiguous rock stars such as David Bowie, Elton John and Brian Eno reigned. The film examines with some bravado the way these men brought elements long confined to the gay underground to the screaming masses. Haynes is an openly gay filmmaker and all of his movies have been clever allegories about homosexuality and how society deals with it. But "Velvet Goldmine" is his most direct movie to date. Seesawing back and forth in time, the film is about a young journalist named Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) assigned in 1984 to do a story on the rise and fall of a long-lost glitz rock star named Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), whose career came to a numbing halt after Slade faked his own assassination on stage during a concert. He got the attention he wanted, but when it was discovered that the whole thing was a hoax, Slade was ostracized by betrayed fans and associates and went into hiding, disappearing. Haynes obviously modeled Slade after Bowie, and the character comes replete with an onstage alter ego whom Slade calls Maxwell Demon. Rhys-Meyers, who is excellent, suitably petulant and vague in the role, plays Slade as a practicing bisexual, married to Mandy (the riveting Toni Collette), an American woman with British pretensions, but not beyond sleeping with his American, Iggy Pop-like counterpart, Curt Wild (played with wild abandon, in keeping with his character's name, I guess, by Ewan McGregor). As Welles did with "Citizen Kane," Haynes keeps all this artistically askew, as his film jumps around as madly as his large cast of characters do. Faces pop up, are made to seem important and then are dismissed by the director, disappearing (like Slade) ... only to surface again later. This is especially true of another rock star named Jack Fairy (Micko Westmoreland), who is introduced in the film's crucial first scene as a little boy inspired by the ghost of Oscar Wilde and who later, as a professional, would pass on Wilde's influence to Brian Slade and others. As Stuart interviews Mandy and Curt and a whole slew of others, recalling how much he idolized Slade as a youth and how much he was inspired by the dubious revolutionary politics of his music, he starts to question his own sexuality. He's a walking metaphor for a closeted man waiting for a revelation, for a sign to come out. "Velvet Goldmine" takes the subversive, unpopular stance that, yes, celebrities do operate as role models -- that we are as influenced by their irresponsible behavior as we are by their "art." It's about people who made decadence commonplace.
This time, Haynes powers his message with a lot of music, some of it old, some of it new, all of it brilliantly staged (and sung by its stars, with no dubbing). And all of it is aptly hallucinatory, man. Technically, Haynes' concepts are often astonishing. He stages elaborate, otherworldly musical numbers at various points within the film -- sometimes to propel the action, sometimes just because he feels like it. In almost every case, the glitter and lipstick sequences are perfectly in sync with the free-wheeling direction of the rest of the film. Haynes' concepts are a bit far-reaching at times, most notably in his claim of Oscar Wilde as the original glam-rock god. More often than not, though, "Velvet Goldmine" rides a sinfully delicious balance between historical fact and sparkling fiction.
Joey Guerra "Velvet Goldmine" is a camp classic about classic camp, or would be if it had that kind of energy level. As it is, it's about nothing much, namely glam rock. Todd Haynes's film about the flare-up of the in-your-face artifice of the '70s is easily his most ambitious, but he runs smack into the limitations imposed upon him by the intrinsically glitter-deep subject matter. Given that, and the fact that his druggy protagonists spend liberal amounts of screen time comatose, perhaps you will see why the film derives most of its entertainment value from the music by the likes of Brian Eno, Gary Glitter, Brian Ferry, and Iggy Pop.
Jay Carr With all the drugs, glitter and pansexual lovemaking in "Velvet Goldmine," England does, indeed, swing like a pendulum. It's about the '70s glam-rock scene. It's about how much writer/director Todd Haynes loves sequins. But, mostly, this mind-blowing visual feast is about the glory of music -- back before it was institutionalized, back when you could still go to a big concert and be surprised, back when it was vital and spiky and fun, as if they'd just discovered the electric guitar (which, come to think of it, isn't far from the truth). It doesn't make much sense to talk about the "Velvet Goldmine" characters. They're mostly pretty things on whom Haynes hangs his stunning images and cheeky swipes from the structure and characters of "Citizen Kane." Instead of dialogue, the virtually nonstop songs express the feelings of freedom and release that propelled the glitter-rock era.
Chris Hewitt
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