Velvet Goldmine

Director: Tom Haynes

Starring: Ewan MacGregor, John Rhys Meyers, Christian Bale, and the contents of every retro-boutique in Kensington

Moviemaking tips I gleaned from seeing Velvet Goldmine:

When you run out of or otherwise have the budget for your dream-movie cut, wait until you get fresh capital before you resume shooting.

Have one omniscient narrator, not two or six or nineteen.

Make sure your script is written by someone who is actually alive, or at least who was alive at the conception of the movie. It was nice to hear Oscar Wilde's many aphorisms, but some actual dialogue would have been nicer.

Have a script.

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I admit the bulk of glam was mostly ignored by me at the time of its height, even though I am old enough to remember some sort of fuss about spacey rockstars with orange hair. A couple of decades' distance made Bowie et al seem more appealing, however - especially compared with the Garbage Pail Kids look of grunge.

Be that as it may, by the time this movie began to be talked about I was a fan of many "glam" artists of the past and the present, and I eagerly awaited its release. All sorts of androgynous fun had been promised. Initial reviews were good. Some of my favorite musicians had worked on the project -- Thom Yorke, Brian Molko from Placebo. The film was only being shown at the one "arty" major moviehouse (as opposed to the actual barebones art-movie dungeon where all the other tiny-budget independent films went) so I plunked down my $6.50 and went all the way to the last theater in the place (it was one of those warren-like multiplexes).

The film: halfway through the enigmatic proceedings it occured to me that this film was not so much about nostalgia for the lost beauty of the seventies as it was about how the director hated the eighties. Now that is a decade I did participate in. But though well over a third of the film is set in 1984, I looked in vain for the big hair, the shoulder pads, the artificial sci-fi colors and shiny clothes of New Wave. And punk? Where was that? In New York in the eighties, where the 1984 scenes take place (London actually standing in rather poorly for said city), I know that there were plenty of spike-haired, leather-jacketed US punks. Not in this film. And everything in the ten-years-after scenes was filmed in Shades O' Grunge, ten years too soon. The only authentic touch was the presence of one of those antique Commodore or Tandy PCs, of the kind that had green characters on a black screen, and ran off 5 1/4-inch disks. But there were a number of scenes in the film that went nowhere (see the need for having a script cited above), such as the X-Files-like presence of strange old men in suits seeming to stand in the way of our intrepid reporter finding out what happened to his idol, and the shots of what looked like breadlines and a couple of AK-47-toting soldiers that are not part of my memories of the Reaganite eighties.

Then there is the seeming "solution" to the mystery of whatever happened to Brian Slade, in the form of a neo-conservative cheesy popstar named "Tommy Stone," shown posing for screaming fans and praising the President of the United States, which is something no popstar (maybe Wayne Newton?) would have even bothered to do in 1984. (For some reason the name of "Reagan" was not used, instead someone else's name that I could not quite make out was substituted. This was no doubt a distancing effect that the director intended to add to the "dreamlike" effect he apparently wanted the movie to have, but it just came off sounding weird.) After a while I just decided that the movie played like something that was written in, say, 1975 or -6, after glam but before punk, during what I called the "dead" years when the thought of the coming decade, especially the year 1984, still seemed to promise doom to some people. This is probably what the director intended, but we know when the movie was made, so it just does not work, at least not as conceived and filmed by Tom Haynes, a director that has been added to my list (along with Gus Van Zant) of independent film-makers to avoid.

The 70's scenes were more authentic-looking, despite the plethora of clichés straight out of all those other 70's rock-epics (such as the stiff, lifeless parents from Quadrophenia, who seem to do nothing all day except watch their telly; and the requisite joyless orgy scene that no rock movie is complete without). Definitely the clothes helped. Most of the budget apparently went to costume, and it showed. I almost felt like doing something I had never in my life, even in the actual seventies, wanted to do: buy a pair of platform shoes.

Oddly enough, the glam life and gay-bisexual life is made to look rather unattractive in the movie, which is (from the interviews that I have read) the opposite of what the director wanted to do. For a movie that was supposed to be a celebration of the era, it was more Glum than Glam. And the male love scenes that were supposed to show how passionate and symbiotic the relationship between Slade and the Iggy stand-in were shot in such a way as to make them look perfunctory and, well, the opposite of romantic. The love scene between the Slade character and the actress who plays his wife was more convincing - at least you got the idea that these two were, at least at that moment, gaga for each other.

But the storyline -- that much-lauded storyline about the "Bowie-esque" rockstar's mysterious decline and fall, etc. -- let me just say that "underdeveloped" is the best word I can come up with for what passed as a story here. This movie didn't need Jack Fairy, it needed the plot fairy. The characters didn't fare much better. The best one was the reporter, Arthur Stuart (played by Christian Bale with a quite passable - to my American ears anyway - English accent). He was the only character we could muster up any sympathy for. But then, he was somewhat based, I gather, on the director himself, while the other characters were based it seemed on the covers of Mr. Haynes' favorite albums.

It's not easy playing a character who is based on a combination of airbrushed posters and famous anecdotes, but the actors give it that old college try. John Rhys Meyers was quite pretty, but not androgynous enough; they just don't make men as skinny as they did in the seventies. Maybe it is diet but everyone in the movie was just slighty too healthy and substantial looking. The only actor that truly pulled off the requisite gender-bending appearance was the one who played Jack Fairy (an actor I have never heard of named Micko Westmoreland, who gets a lot of scenes but only two or three lines of dialogue that I can remember). Christian Bale, oddly enough, looked older when he was playing his seventies-era self than when he was playing his older, 1984 self. The character of Brian Slade's wife was supposed to have been based on Angie Bowie, and if Angie Bowie sounded and acted like Liza Minelli playing Sally Bowles then the performance was an authentic one. (Then after she leaves Brian, she seems to turn into Marianne Faithful. Whatever.)

Totally missing from the performances, the "script" - whatever - is whatever magnetic force of character made Brian Slade aka "Maxwell Demon" aka Tommy Stone so central to the lives of the other characters in the movie that when he is out of their lives they seemed to have just fallen apart. It may be that such a part is impossible for any human being to portray, but then we would first have needed a script with carefully delineated character parts, and there was nothing of the sort to be found in this movie.

Ewan MacGregor ("American" accent problematic - apparently based on listening to Robbie Robertson, a Canadian, which is what he mostly sounded like) didn't remind me of Iggy Pop at all, though he performed his rock-star stage antics just like him. But what he looked like was Kurt Cobain, which was quite disturbing. The director claims that that was unintentional, but I would have at least not made the mistake of dying the actor's hair blond. Iggy did frequently sport other hair-colors -- brown, black -- so they could have kept that "authenticity" thing going without giving us the thrill of seeing a Cobain lookalike having sex with the other main male characters in the movie.

Not that we minded seeing Mr. MacGregor naked (full frontal, Ewan fans!) - not at all. One of the chief pleasures of going to see a movie with Ewan MacGregor in it is getting at least one scene of the actor in his birthday suit. (I presume we aren't going to get that pleasure in the new Star Wars movie.)

All the other characters in the movie were barely existant - there was the nice gay first manager (Eddie Izzard - I love that name - it's the actor's real one) who gets dumped, the slimy flashy manager who is never without a cigar in his fist, the neophyte innocent secretary who gets corrupted, and any number of flaming queens with poncy lisps and mincing walks. The only really good things in the film were the musical scenes, and there were too many of the cabaret-folk type of Glam songs (Haynes really wanted to use "Lady Stardust" et al but Bowie refused since he is making his own film yadda yadda, so the director, and Michael Stipe, apparently decided to just make most of the songs sound sort of like "Lady Stardust"), and not enough numbers with that T. Rex-meets-Stooges type energy. Standouts: "Baby's On Fire" (an old Brian Eno tune) and a version of T. Rex's "Twentieth-Century Boy" with the Jack Fairy character doing Little Nell doing Marc Bolan. There were way too many repititious scenes of British public-school boys wandering through fields of flowers, or just standing there with their eyes closed; way too many sentimental scenes of people doing nothing much while a saccharine female or male voice oozes slogans or bits of poetry (I really didn't care for the way Oscar Wilde's words were often used to underscore the rather distasteful sentimentality that was the other mood of the film - I mean, this is the person who wrote: "It is impossible to read the death of Dicken's Little Nell without laughing"); way too many disjointed scenes that went nowhere. And there was an Oscar Wilde/UFO plot element that I can only call stupid, and which should have been pruned from the movie altogether. In many ways Velvet Goldmine reminded me of that old Marc Bolan film I have, which consists of Mr. Bolan pretending to play instruments and sing in a variety of settings, interacting with people in funny costumes, driving a lime-green car, having tea, and just sitting around looking daft.

The one striking effect in the movie was the way that it was filmed to look as if it had actually been shot in the seventies. It had that slightly washed-out, depthless, matte look that I remember from countless films and television series of the era. There were even cheesy seventies camera shots, such as that one where the lens will focus for no reason on the side of someone's face in the lower left-hand side of the screen while music swells up out of nowhere, and then the focus shifts to the landscape beyond. It would be interesting to know how those effects were accomplished.

But at the end of the evening the reaction of my friend and I was, "Huh?" Two hours or so gone from our lives, just like that.