Insult
Never mind why (I didn't rent it), but we watched De-Lovely last night, the Cole Porter biopic starring Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd. I still don't know what Kathleen expected, but I was prepared to dislike it as much as Amadeus. Hollywood hasn't done very well by famous composers; the only interesting films with a serious-music edge are melodramas from the Forties like Humoresque and The Great Lie. Cole Porter probably had the most filmable biography of any composer. (Gershwin, as we were reminded in last week's New Yorker, was shunned by everybody for bad behavior until the doctors finally discovered a massive brain tumor a day or so before he died - who wants to sit through that?) His story would be interesting even if he'd never written a single hit. Given this second account of one of the truly fabulous American lives of the Twentieth Century, I've come to believe that it was the greatness of Porter's work that got in the way.
I don't intend to write a little review of the movie, which is, in the end, worth seeing, and which has many good points, not the least of which is Ms Judd's ailing Linda Lee toward the end. What angers me about De-Lovely is its falsification of the Porter marriage. In the movie, Cole Porter is an introspective fun-seeker who likes to go to bed with men, but whose heart belongs to a wonderful woman whose love, in return, allows him a very long leash. Perhaps the real Cole Porter would have been happy with this emotional arrangement, had it been available. But it wasn't. Porter was a gay man living in the beau monde who was lucky enough to find a woman of the world who also wanted to be married in the beau monde. Linda Lee was a friend, perhaps even a very close friend - I don't know - but she did not have any claims on Porter's heart, nor could she solace it. Porter didn't look anything like Kevin Kline (he was far shorter, far plainer, and his voice was totally tenor), and his love-life was the usual upper-crust cliché of brief, impossible romances. These inspired many of his songs, so it would have been edifying to see more of them, but in De-Lovely they're nothing but inconsequential flings, menacing nothing worse than the occasional logistic embarrassment. We're asked to applaud the film's bravery in so much as it acknowledges Porter's carnal circuitry, but we're denied the opportunity to see it in operation.
For a thousand, or perhaps only one or two, good reasons, Hollywood still has trouble with homosexuality, and, yes, it ought to be applauded for trying to cope. There are still millions and millions of Americans who, this year anyway, are ready to believe that the normalization of "deviancy" is all Kinsey's fault, and to follow "experts" who deploy pseudo-scientific balderdash in the attempt to return to a world that even Norman Rockwell would have found falsely saccharine. That's why I think that the better course would have been simply not to make De-Lovely, to let the story wait for a better future. The high-concept aspects of the movie - great songs sung by hot, current artists, such as Mr and Mrs Elvis Costello and Sheryl Crow; the glamorous Gatsby-era sets and costumes - can't save this false-hearted version of an intriguing story; they only make it more meretricious, like brandy on top of bad fish. The screenplay is deeply untrue to Porter and to the sorrows of gay life at a particular moment in the past, but the movie itself is even worse, because it transforms Ashley Judd into a matron who could easily be Margaret Dumont's younger sister, without any redeeming camp effect. The capable cast and crew of De-Lovely have been grossly disserved by a marketable lie. Cole Porter, his music and his reputation will survive. But most gay people will have been moved back a couple of spaces on the board game of life. Perhaps I'm asking too much. Perhaps we ought to welcome the measure of social progress that will tolerate homosexual sex as long as loving wives are willing to do so.
