# Velvet Goldmine (1998)

### reviewed by
Scott Renshaw

    VELVET GOLDMINE
    (Miramax)
    Starring:  Ewan McGregor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Toni Collette, Christian
    Bale.
    Screenplay:  Todd Haynes.
    Producer:  Christine Vachon.
    Director:  Todd Haynes.
    MPAA Rating:  R (sexual situations, nudity, adult themes, profanity, drug
    use)
    Running Time:  120 minutes.
    Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

The pieces are familiar, but they don't quite fit together. A reporter tries to uncover the secrets behind a mysterious celebrity, interviewing his ex-wife at a night club. Extended, surrealistic, dialogue-free musical interludes are used to advance character and set tone. Campy dialogue, gaudy costumes and ambiguous sexuality flourish. Speculative romantic connections are established between roman-a-clef versions of pop music stars, accompanied by effectively pseudo-period new songs. It's CITIZEN KANE meets PINK FLOYD THE WALL, THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW meets GRACE OF MY HEART. And that's saying nothing of the suggestion that Oscar Wilde, the father of flamboyance, was an alien progeny.

Welcome to the evocative, provocative world of writer/director Todd Haynes, the man who used Barbie dolls to tell the story of Karen Carpenter in the little-seen underground film SUPERSTAR, and who fashioned a sublime, complex cautionary tale about environmental and psychological collapse in SAFE. In VELVET GOLDMINE, a fictionalized account of the early 70s glam rock scene, Haynes takes a somewhat appropriate style over substance approach. The center of the story is the rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust...I mean, Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), an androgynous music sensation who created a musical alter-ego called Maxwell Demon and bears no resemblance to any real music stars, living or David...I mean dead. Along the way Slade meets Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), an American proto-punk whose onstage theatrics influence Slade to transform from singer to full-fledged performance artist.

The relationship between Slade and Wild -- actually a romantic triangle including Slade's wife Mandy (Toni Collette) -- is only one piece of the collage of decadence Haynes patches together. VELVET GOLDMINE is less a narrative than it is a long-form music video, intriguing images full of manufactured outrageousness (including the bizarre Oscar Wilde prologue). As such, it certainly re-creates its era effectively. The music, the mood and the theatricality are all pure glam; Rhys Meyers looks perfectly the part as pop creation already beginning to eat itself. But Haynes piles stylish surface on top of stylish surface in VELVET GOLDMINE until it never quite gets at the heart of anything -- not the artists, not the appeal of glam, not even whether the scene was about social change or filthy lucre.

It certainly comes awfully close on occasion. More compelling than the actual story of Brian Slade is the film's framing story, which finds reporter Arthur Stewart (Christian Bale) trying to track down Slade in 1984, ten years after a stunt in which Slade staged his own mid-concert assassination. It turns out that Arthur was in attendance at that concert, and that Slade and Wild were key figures in his youth. In one wonderfully cross-cut sequence, Arthur's sexual awakening is connected to the sexual excesses of Slade's entourage, suggesting that even in their self-absorption the glam rockers -- often tormented as children for their sexual individuality -- succeeded at expanding boundaries for other youth. Yet even this storyline spins into an absurd, pointless conspiracy-mystery which Arthur could have put together only by actually viewing footage from the film we're watching.

That's the kind of infatuation with his own film-making that Haynes displays in VELVET GOLDMINE. Because it's always visually engrossing, it keeps holding out the hope that it's going somewhere substantial. Instead, it offers the cinematic equivalent of hip-hop sampling, turning into a montage of visual and musical cues from other pieces of popular cinema; Haynes even cribs from SUPERSTAR with a romantic scene between two dolls. If glam was somehow about the fine line between profound and shallow, Haynes has hit the mark dead on. This is one deliberately confounding spectacle.

         On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 saggy stardusts:  5.

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