Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine is an intricate, outre
delight that leaves you feeling empty and dissatisfied, at least in part by
design, reflecting the passing of the short-lived glamrock era it swims within.
To say that Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ Brian Slade is a “Bowie-like” figure hardly
captures the extent of the correspondence, as the character appropriates the
sound, the look, the cultural positioning, the fluid sexuality, and other big
chunks of the biography: the big difference is that whereas Bowie renewed
himself multiple times after retiring Ziggy Stardust, the more conventionally
mortal Slade has to engineer a fake shooting before disappearing for years,
eventually reappearing in such radically overhauled form that no one knows it’s
him. The film is gorgeously and tangibly imagined, crammed with perfectly-judged
costumes and videos and posters and album covers, and has some fantastically
combustible sequences, all of this shoehorned though into a rather turgid (and
pointlessly Citizen Kane-evoking) framework involving a journalist
(Christian Bale) who ten years later tries to put the story together. There’s
none of Bowie’s music in the film – apparently he refused permission – but we
do hear instantly recognizable tracks from Lou Reed, T-Rex and others, giving
the distractingly strange impression of a parallel universe in which music
evolved in exactly the same way, with the same people (even Gilbert O’Sullivan!),
minus that one vital figure. Another much-debatable point, the use of a
different actor to play Slade in his new identity was criticized by Meyers, and
perhaps too easily allows points of logistical quibbling (no plastic surgery
was ever as successful…), but seems to me in a way to cement Bowie’s
uniqueness, his near-supernatural capacity for renewal needing in his absence
to be made literal (like Dr. Who, one might think). The film is brave, emotionally
expansive, and galvanizingly slippery and unpredictable; little matter then if it’s
often on the dull side too.
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