After dinner at Musso & Frank's last night (and while Dear BK and Dear Reader Panni were at Amoeba Records and my refrigerator was hissing and leaking water) I headed to the historic Egyptian Theatre in the heart of Hollywood, U.S.A. to watch an advance screening of the new Cole Porter biopic, De-Lovely, directed by Irwin Winker.
This film is neither the disaster that some have predicted, nor is it a particularly good film.
The good news: Mr. Porter's music is front and center in the film and it is treated with respect.
The bad news: there are plenty of flaws of ample magnitude in this film.
The central conceit of the movie is that Mr. Porter (Kevin Kline), in a state of advanced age and accompanied by someone only identified as Gabe (Jonathan Pryce), is brought to a run-down theatre, on the stage of which Mr. Porter's life--commencing with his introduction to Linda Lee (Ashley Judd)--is played out as a musical.
Creaky though this premise may be, it would work, except that the film frequently comes back to the aged Porter and Gabe, with Porter making comments about what he's seeing on stage. These scenes chop up the flow of the narrative and their parallel to It's A Wonderful Life, intentional or not, is obvious and not very supportive of De-Lovely's mission.
As for the musical numbers, the people in some of the scenes break out into song and dance, and these are the weakest scenes in the film. The one such scene that takes place on the MGM lot is particularly risible. Sometimes, it's Porter himself singing a song, be it to Linda, in the context of a show rehearsal, or in some other scenario, and these scenes work fine. The musical scenes that work best, and provide this film its greatest redeeming qualities, are when songs are used on the soundtrack to dramatically counterpoint the events we are seeing on the screen. (Some scenes--logically--have a band and singer on the set, but they work the same effect.)
Kevin Kline is quite good as Cole Porter. This is a reserved performance, not the antic Kevin Kline we have seen in much of his earlier work. Ashley Judd is OK as Linda. Her vocal inflection, however, is more than a little too pedestrian for someone of Linda's time and place.
The dialogue is a bit creaky in places, clever in others. Best line comes after Cole and Linda have viewed Night and Day together before its theatrical release, when Cole says "If I can survive that movie, I can survive anything."
Porter's preference for the physical company of men is dealt with directly in the film, and is the source of much of the film's dramatic tension. It also provides a source for some well-placed humor in the dialogue.
Kline, who has an excellent singing voice, for the most part emulates the real Cole Porter's voice, which was so-so at its very best. Most of the vocal interpretations by contemporary performers (i.e., Elvis Costello, Alanis Morissette, Diana Krall, Natalie Cole, etc.) are quite good, though Costello gets a bit heavy handed in places.
Some annoyances about the film: At a little over two hours, it is too long by about twenty minutes. There are two sub-plots, one involving a family whose relationship to the Porters is never fully explained and another involving some unseemly business, that could have been cut with no loss to the narrative. There's a sequence in black and white that makes no sense being in black and white because the characters, settings and events in it are of a whole with the rest of the picture. Mr. Winkler should have a restraining order placed on him that would prevent him from ever doing 360 degree shots ever again. Surely a less predictable approach could have guided the sequence in which Porter is injured while horseback riding. Although the makeup work on Judd as she ages is quite good, the job they did on Kline for the scenes in which he watches his life flashed back on stage is ludicrous.
De-Lovely is a certain improvement over Night and Day. I await the definitive cinematic telling of Cole Porter's life and art.
