FilmBlather.com

"I didn't know how much my happiness would hurt us."

De-Lovely's slightly shady portrayal of legendary composer Cole Porter convinces me that the man himself was much darker still. Irwin Winkler's film hints at the disturbing but then cautiously backs away from it, treating its subject with a reverence that he may well deserve but that also inevitably makes a biopic uninteresting. "Yeah, and then what?" you may find yourself asking as Porter (Kevin Kline) marries an easygoing, devoted woman (Ashley Judd) and starts running around with men on the side. And then nothing, if you believe this movie.

The approach is fundamentally flawed, relentlessly taking a celebratory tone to the history of a man whose life wasn't always something to celebrate. Winkler and screenwriter Jay Cocks (Gangs of New York) decide to tell Porter's story using his own songs (which presents several different problems, actually) as the dying (or is it dead?) man looks back on his own life as a musical, and after a while, the movie just seems to be in denial: look, no matter how much Ashley Judd may beam at the screen, this was not a happy marriage.

As if that wasn't enough, Winkler (Life as a House) doesn't really have a conception of how to make a musical. When Kevin Kline -- who isn't much of a singer, but then neither was Porter, so I guess that's the point -- breaks into song, the scenes are inevitably wan and lacking in any real spirit; the shot selection is clumsy and the editing rarely builds momentum. Musical numbers in movies (or on stage, for that matter) can rarely survive on the strength of the song alone -- if the execution isn't precise, they're liable to look cheesy, bizarre, both, or worse. Here, they're mostly just ineffective, eliciting several physical shrugs from yours truly.

De-Lovely also insists on maintaining the inoffensive, dreamy tone of a Cole Porter musical throughout its at least nominally substantial story. The problem is that Cole Porter's plays and music didn't tell substantial stories -- a large part of the appeal was their cheerful vapidity. Here, when the relentlessly airy songs are a) removed from their context and b) deployed in service of something intended to have an emotional effect other than uplift, their genial inanity becomes aggressive, irritating inanity.

As you may have gathered, the story is told in elaborate flashbacks, with a mysterious character played by Jonathan Pryce showing Kline, in a wheelchair and heavy make-up, the highlights and lowlights of the latter's life in musical form. There are elaborate trick shots spanning long periods of time, and action on the stage magically becomes ambient as the camera glides along. None of this, unfortunately, works to build any sort of coherent atmosphere -- the tone of the affair remains bland, awkward and uncertain. Film usually achieves emotional affect via some sort of change -- in style, in form, in story -- but De-Lovely is so static it cannot even manage to get a reaction.

The June release date notwithstanding, MGM is probably hoping to get this movie some awards attention. It's certainly not out of the question that the Academy and other groups might go for this sort of tedious whitewash. With any luck, they, along with everyone else will see De-Lovely for what it is: a sterilization of a complicated man's life, for non-entertainment purposes.