The hardest kind of history to portray is the recent stuff.
If you are a young filmmaker, how do you get a fix on the mindset of a
generation in the twenties or thirties when there are still enough living
witnesses to argue with you. Time will eventually blur the images, and the atmosphere of
the times will be re-interpreted through the ages.
But people still remember the 1920s.
So it is with “De-Lovely”, a screen biography of Cole Porter. It
seems accurate enough to suggest that those in his generation who had financial
security and made the most noise, danced, literally, around the top of the
pyramid. Song and dance, Broadway,
smoking, drinking, glorious clothes for men and women, networking - how much
good life can money buy? The
composer went to Yale and Harvard Law School and cavorted with the artists and
intellectuals of Post World War I Europe and New York.
How well director Irwin Winkler captures the scene will depend on your
personal memories of other generations. He
tries hard, and if he isn’t too successful in his casting of actors who seem
awkward and wooden in a time of lightness, he is hugely so in reminding us of
what Cole Porter wrote for Broadway. There
is not a comparable body of music that has crossed from the theater to the
mainstream with the consistency and power of Porter’s.
Think of it: Night and Day,
De-Lovely, Let’s Fall in Love – and the scores for Kiss Me Kate and Anything
Goes.
His personal life, tackled here in depth, is far more complex, and all of
it is reflected in his music. Before
his marriage to Linda Porter, her husband told her he was gay.
The bright and lovely Linda adored Cole Porter, married him anyway and
helped shepherd his gifts to the public. With
time, it became harder to accept his second life without bitterness.
A calamitous riding
accident finally left Porter physically twisted and angry.
The sexuality, the adulation, the humiliation, and the fall - all of it
is unremittingly sad. Director
Winkler tries to capture a social period to the lilt of Porter’s show tunes.
With his wide-ranging talents, Kevin Kline grasps the composer’s
well-documented vulnerabilities and appetites.
Ashley Judd tries endearingly hard, but doesn’t break out of certain
stiffness.
Gerald and Sarah Murphy exemplify my premise:
they aren’t my Murphys, but in a few years there will be fewer people
with close reading knowledge of them. The
imagery will dim. In another
generation, Porter’s music will still soar (My thirteen year old movie buddy
went straight home to download Porter’s work from Itunes to her Ipod).
It is astonishing to listen to all those fragments of songs knowing that their elegance and cleverness will carry them forward and knowing also that the man who poured his personal life into them was a tortured soul. Flawed as the movie may be, both the joy and sadness of his wonderful music stays with you.
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