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Velvet Goldmine review
by Remington Dahl
http://www.movie-reviews.com

Got your mother in a whirl
She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl ...
Rebel Rebel you’ve torn your dress
Rebel Rebel your face is a mess
Rebel Rebel how could they know
Hot Tramp I love you so.
- David Bowie, 1974

Fictionalizing Britain’s glam rock movement of the 1970s and unfolding as an operatic ode to Citizen Kane, Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine sustains, for a while, a garish and gorgeous fantasy that eventually regresses toward the bland boundaries of reality.

Dublin, 1854: We witness the arrival-- by spaceship!-- of an infant who will later become homosexual icon Oscar Wilde. Haynes finds in the famous playwright a plausible model of inspiration for fictional 1970s singer Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers); a David Bowie-ish glitter rocker who becomes something of a messiah for sexually confused young mods of post-hippie England.

A decade later, a New York newspaper sends British music journalist Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) to his homecountry to write a piece about the 10-year anniversary of the night on which Slade staged his own “assassination” during a concert shortly before dropping out of existence. So, much like the reporter in Citizen Kane who searched for meaning in the dying word (“Rosebud”) of a citizen named Kane, Stuart interviews various persons about their former relationship to the fallen star in hopes he’ll discover some significance in Slade’s bogus death.

Among the subjects that Stuart interviews-- and around whom Haynes frames his movie’s non-linear narrative-- are Slade’s first manager (a wheelchair-bound character echoing Joseph Cotten’s handicapped Kane colleague) and Slade’s Angie Bowie-like former wife (Toni Collette). Stuart’s third interview subject is Slade’s match for sexual ambiguity if not for glamour: an American hard rocker named Curt Wild-- seemingly inspired by Iggy Pop and played to absolute triumph by Ewan McGregor.

This all plays out with less confusion than you might suspect from a written summery of the movie. Haynes (Poison, Safe) is a world-class filmmaker, and for all his wild adventures in surrealism here (including one scene that is acted out by a little girl who lends voice-over to her dolls!), Velvet Goldmine maintains a unique kind of clarity throughout.

This happy hallucination becomes all too conscious, however, during its last hour. It’s as if Haynes is doing his own cover version of fallen-rock-star films past: we get drug abuse, wasted studio time, the fed up spouse who’ll suffer the spoiled celebrity/child no more. And most viewers will spend the movie’s laborious final thirty minutes expecting credits to roll at any given moment.

It’s a frustratingly dull and drawn-out finish to an often extraordinary act of filmmaking. (Rated R.)

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