From the actors’ perspective, Behind the Candelabra looks like a compassionate portrayal of the pianist and singer Liberace‘s relationship with Scott Thorson. The older established celebrity’s involvement with a younger man, masked for the public from 1977 to Liberace’s death in 1987, gets exposed here as an example of the deception then practiced by some gay performers. The title of this HBO production either criticizes or ridicules the closet, but as Michael Douglas portrays Liberace and Matt Damon portrays Thorson, there’s also a strange confession of the weaknesses and dependencies that occur in such insecure and unstable showbiz relationships.

Matt Damon in Behind the Candelabra.

The film itself feels unstable partly because Richard LaGravanese’s screenplay starts from Thorson’s memoir, taking the defensive view of a complainant in a palimony case. Behind the Candelabra shows Thorson as a “bisexual” with interest in becoming a veterinarian who, through association with gay hustlers, is picked up to be Liberace’s consort (one in a series). The two go from friends to lovers to a filial partnership. Liberace proposes adopting Thorson to make their coupling legal; Thorson even undergoes plastic surgery to resemble Liberace (and to fit Liberace’s romantic ideal). Through the attrition and tension of intimacy (as well as drugs, sex and materialist escapades) they part acrimoniously, leaving Thorson thrown back on the working-class heap. A star is not born.

Douglas and Damon attempt illuminating these men’s fragile humanity. (A shot of Rock Hudson’s death notice in a newspaper headline casts the fatal pall of AIDS.) Their almost fascinating commitment to these roles–portraying romantic and social clowns putting forth fronts for peers, audiences and each other–bounces back on the stars’ own artistic dedication. After years of seeing Douglas play scoundrels and Damon as politically-correct paragons, they (even when bare-assed) can’t help but lend villainy to Liberace and victimhood to Thorson. It’s Douglas and Damon’s stock-in-trade and possibly what they best understand about human nature: the greed and selfishness of power and the resentment and ambition of the powerless.

Michael Douglas as Liberace in Behind the Candelabra.

Regrettably, this approach also limits Behind the Candelabra to stock characterizations. Another aspect of the film’s instability comes from its conceit that by looking back at the wreckage of Liberace and Thorson’s closeted lives; the film makes an au courant Marriage Equality parable. But Marriage Equality wouldn’t resolve a relationship where partners are unequally joined or mutually exploitative, contradicting their monogamous commitment or one that is based on unspecified consensual deals that differ from traditional fidelity.

These complexities, the conditions of partnership and details of character that override the Marriage Equality issue, get mixed up with the inexact parallels of Liberace and Thorson’s quasi-liberated lives. Too often Douglas’ sympathetic performance looks and sounds wide-eyed and goofy-voiced like Carol Channing, while Damon improbably suggests Cesar Caligari’s childlike creature, un-willful yet petulant.

In depicting these wildly luxurious and disingenuous lifestyles, director Steven Soderbergh seems to confuse Liberace and Thorson with the out-gay Las Vegas magicians, Siegfried and Roy. Behind the Candelabra is partly, unmistakably, a freak show (Magic Mike II). And this is where the actors’ empathy and the director’s condescension collide. It recalls that ungracious moment in George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck taking a gratuitous slam at Librace, ignoring the fact that his flamboyance was never totally deceptive. Liberace’s public (like Little Richard’s) always “knew.” (Liberace was the Elton John of Vegas, a glitzy dresser and colorful entertainer to all.)

Soderbergh can’t find an appropriate moral context for this story. Using the glib cynicism he learned from Mike Nichols, Candelabra turns into a roman a clef circus performed by a bevy of comic pranksters: Dan Ayckroyd, Rob Lowe, Scott Bakula, Paul Reisner and Debbie Reynolds as Liberace’s money-grubbing mother. Soderbergh’s dismissive treatment ignores Liberace’s artistry, judging his showmanship not for its skill and friendly kitsch but as proof of bad taste rather than emotional generosity. This beauty-and-the-beast concept is what’s kitschy.

Not a zeitgeist filmmaker, Oliver Stone is, rather, our swiftest, most politically responsive filmmaker, and those attributes make Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps dazzling. It’s less a sequel to the 1987 stock-trading drama Wall Street (where Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko articulated the 1980s mantra “Greed is Good”) than it is a lightening-quick assessment of our current economic disaster. Rather than celebrating our confusion, Stone resurrects Gekko—here released from more than a decade in prison—and through him examines the still ruthless and corrupt financial system.

Rich people don’t ride the subway. Losers.

Nothing changes in the corridors of power, but since Wall Street, Stone has become a masterly filmmaker. No one edits plot, behavior and atmosphere more splendidly. In Money Never Sleeps, he links middle-aged Gekko’s comeback with hot-shot upstart Jake Moore (Shia LaBoeuf), who schemes to combat the double-crossing tycoon Bretton James (Josh Brolin) while proposing marriage to Gekko’s daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan), a crusading blogger. All the while Stone depicts Moral Hazard, the affluent, unquestioned license of our technocratic, celebritocracy. This is the glamorous, seething world that Steven Soderbergh couldn’t quite grasp in the hastily improvised yet shallow The Girlfriend Experience.

Stone has refined his creative energy and focuses on being a mythmaker of giants as in Alexander and his series of presidential epics JFK, Nixon and W. Few filmmakers have such a magisterial filmography or an impulse to understand contemporary American experience through its leaders. Not even Jonathan Franzen’s highly-lauded zeitgeist novel Freedom boasts more resonant cultural details than Stone. From the ironies of black and Latino ex-cons who have moved up on their terms to astonishing surveys of the post-9/11 New York skyline, Rodrigo Prieto’s camera virtually strokes the gleaming, phallic skyscrapers. In an instant-classic Museum of Natural History fundraiser sequence, Stone crafts a montage of assorted rich womens’ ostentatious earrings. This film pinpoints greed and luxe as no other movie ever has: America shimmers on the edge of apocalypse—like a bubble about to burst.

Each major character is defined in personal terms, yet it’s Money Never Sleeps’ sociological microscope that is most impressive. The details in Stone’s script (co-written with Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff) are rich until it succumbs to less fascinating, individual foibles. Replaying the mentor/protégé tension of Wall Street (probably for commercial safety) traps Stone into the LaBeouf-Mulligan subplot. He’s an aggressive twerp and she’s weepy; still, it makes no sense that Gekko’s daughter lacks all cunning. Instead, this should have simply been a battle of giants—those Wall Street bulls and bears who hold the government hostage in shadowy Federal Reserve meetings out of The Godfather. Frank Langella as Jake’s mourned father figure and Brolin’s elegantly venal Bretton James give compelling strength to these devious titans. Prieto’s camera looks into these men’s pores. The film peaks when Brolin’s Bretton says he simply aims for “More.” It’s a superb moment; you could linger in its precise perception of Moral Hazard. Money Never Sleeps isn’t an epic masterpiece like Stone’s World Trade Center, but it’s often amazingly vivid.

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Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Directed by Oliver Stone
Runtime: 136 min