De-Lovely Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)September 7th, 2004
Jonathan Richards
DE-LOVELY
Directed by Irwin Winkler
Screenplay by Jay Cocks
PG-13, 126 minutes
IT'S GOT NO KICK
If you poke around a little in most movies you can find a serviceable metaphor for the movie itself. In Irwin Winkler's portrait of Cole Porter, the songwriter's wife presents him with a cigarette case on the opening night of each of his shows. The cases are beautiful to look at, stylish, sparkling, expensive, elegant, hollow, and flat.
Cole Porter was one of the geniuses of American popular music. Nobody evoked better the bubbles in a glass of champagne, or the smoky taste of brandy at the bottom of a glass. His wit was extraordinary, and seemed effortless. It is one of the disappointments of this film biography that the effort involved is all too apparent.
An early scene, set in a glittering party in Paris in 1918, shows us the meeting of Cole (Kevin Kline) and the emotional love of his life, the beautiful divorcee Linda Lee Thomas (Ashley Judd). Already the dialogue begins to labor: "She could stop your heart." "No, start it." To liven up the festivities, Cole and his best friend Gerald Murphy (Kevin McNally) swing into a lively rendition of "Well Did You Evah?", a song best remembered now for the classic Bing Crosby-Frank Sinatra duet in High Society. Cole draws Linda into the singing, and soon everybody at the party is joining in, contributing lines. The scene is intended as a madcap musical comedy impression, so we probably shouldn't worry too much that we don't know whether Linda and the other guests are supposed to be making up their witticisms as they go along, or whether Cole's song is so famous among this crowd that everyone knows the words. What is worrisome, at this early juncture, is that it's not funny. There will be another madcap production number later on with Louis B. Mayer (Peter Polycarpou) and a cast of MGM extras joining Cole in a zany rendition of "Be a Clown", a scene that never has as much fun as it thinks it's having.
Winkler and his screenwriter, the reformed film critic Jay Cocks, have conceived their story as a series of extended flashbacks. It's not a bad idea, but they don't know what to do with it. The screen comes up on an old Cole in 1964, sitting at the piano in his Manhattan apartment (Kline, swathed in expertly done makeup, looks like an ailing Herbert Marshall). A mysterious visitor named Gabe (Jonathan Pryce), as in "Blow, Gabriel, Blow", arrives to usher him down to a small theater, where, we soon discover, his life is to be played out, literally, before his eyes. "Is this going to be one of those avant-garde things?" Cole says warily.
The answer is, sort of. There's a lunge toward something boldly stylized and Fellini-esque, but the movie lacks the courage of its convictions. Soon it is lurching oddly between varying degrees of theatricality and the safe harbor of conventional biopic. It is a movie constantly in search of a tone.
Cole Porter was homosexual, an aspect of his life ignored by the film starring Cary Grant that was filmed during his lifetime, Night and Day (1946). It's an important aspect of this one, although the carnality is handled discreetly ("Discretion," says Cole dismissively, "is dishonesty wrapped in good breeding;" what he has against either is not clear.) His preference was understood by Linda up front ("You like men better than I do," she says), and it was apparently not much of a problem in their largely sexless marriage. More troublesome was his irresponsibility, a failing which is no respecter of gender or sexual orientation.
The historical inaccuracies and omissions in this movie are many, but they are not what we really care about. A Cole Porter bio must live or die on the songs, and the songs are laid on profusely. Winkler has marshaled a high-profile roster of contemporary stars to interpret them: Elvis Costello doing "Let's Misbehave", Sheryl Crowe purring "Begin the Beguine", Diana Krall with "Just One of Those Things", and Natalie Cole delivering an unforgettable "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye". The danger of this approach is an unevenness of period style: these great performers put their own stamp on the material, and it sometimes jars us out of the moment in time. But the songs are great, they are the reason we're here, and if some of your favorites have been left out, well, consider the incredible wealth there was to draw on.
Winkler is better known as a very successful producer; his most recent directing effort was the lackluster Life as a House(2001), which managed to coax a forgettable performance out of the great Kevin Kline. The only thing Kline does poorly here is sing, and that's deliberate; nominated for two Tonys for musicals early in his career, he sours his singing to emulate the notoriously tin-voiced songwriter. Kline delivers an elegantly nuanced Cole Porter, but he finds himself locked in a struggle against a sometimes clunky script, an uncertain concept, and wobbly direction.
In the final analysis, you have to ask yourself how badly you want to like this movie. There is plenty in it to like, from the meltingly lovely photography by Tony Pierce-Roberts to clothes and sets that make you weep for the vanished elegance of the past; and of course, those songs. If you are of a certain age or a certain temperament, you'll find an hour and a half of this preferable to a lot of other current fare, despite its flaws.
The filmmakers have the bravado to show Cole and Linda at a screening of Night and Day. When it's over, Cole shrugs. "If I can survive this movie," he says, "I can survive anything." He'll survive this one too. He's the top.
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