'Velvet Goldmine' Review: Oscar Gone Wilde: The Story of a Literate Glam Rock

In the 1970s, “bisexual” was the word. It was thrown around during interviews, press conferences to describe just how edgy and different this generation is from the ones that came before. It is the music that accompanied this era of sexual revolution that is the subject of Todd Haynes’s film, “Velvet Goldmine.”

With an all-star cast, including Ewan McGregor, Christian Bale, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and Toni Collette, “Velvet Goldmine” (written by Haynes and James Lyons) tracks the quest of a young British expat journalist Arthur Stuart (Bale) as he tries to write a story about his childhood hero, the fallen Glam Rock star, Brian Slade (Meyers).

Using an almost disorienting amount of voiceover from conversations with interview subjects, Stuart visually relates his own story to the audience about his sexuality, and his ostracism growing up listening to the music that ultimately drove him from his childhood home.

The stories his interviewees tell him add context to Stuart’s own tale, highlighting the power of a musical movement to save souls like Stuart’s from the harm of conventional society, as well as the music industry’s willingness to finance the stars’ insanity, making an organic revolution something corporate.

Stuart’s subject, Brian Slade, is a textbook example of this destructive insanity. Obsessed with, and ultimately ruined by, over the top spectacle, the Slade character is unmistakably based on David Bowie, whose bisexuality is used as a tool to both offend and empower people across Great Britain, and eventually the United States.

As the raw, and occasionally sexually awkward, film carries on, Slade partners with American bad boy rocker Curt Wild (McGregor), to put on a tour reminiscent of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust tour; all the while playing with the music’s history as these artists lived: fast, and loose.

The original music is written and performed in the style of the period songs that the film uses as its soundtrack. Including music by The Stooges, T. Rex, Lou Reed, and Brian Eno, the film runs the gamut of epic hits from the era in a manner that precariously straddles jukebox musical and impressive reinvention of classic songs.

Toni Collette’s Ameri-Brit accented Mandy Slade put it this way in her interview when asked about Wild and Slade: “They weren’t people, they were ideas.”

Despite this apt claim, Haynes adds a tremendous amount of realism to the film by mixing in faux archival documentary and concert footage with the main plot footage, making this a film more about the industry than a fairy-tale Glam Rocker.

To complicate things, this relatively believable story still contains some fantastical elements, namely an emerald that Oscar Wilde receives as a young boy from outer space.

The emerald is passed from Glam Rocker to Glam Rocker, weaving an oddly literate fellowship among pop idols who seem to have no regard for books. Perhaps though, it is this extraterrestrial object that confirms for these otherworldly rockers that there is a glimmer of reality and history in their otherwise entirely fantasized world.

Some helpful articles

I really had no interest in reading other reviews before I wrote and rewrote my own, so as not to color my own thoughts with others', and thus develop my voice better. Below I've posted links and excerpts to two other reviews of the film. One is Tim Robey's review from the Telegraph, which I was particularly interested in because of the English perspective on this film interpretation of a classic piece of English Literature. The other review is Kenneth Turan's from the LA Times. I'm envious of both writers' ability to write with larger word limits, but I also found through reading their pieces that mentioning other versions of films, and name dropping actors and directors who previously tackled a version of the film is a very common practice that doesn't so much add context as it does give the reader a history lesson that he or she can then use in watching or evaluating the film. Turan's article is much more mixed than Robey's, which is more to the 'rave' side of the review continuum, though both are still highly critical. The historical knowledge of film and literature that the two writers employ impressively solidifies their credibility though they probably didn't need it, as they are the film critics for two very large newspapers. As a writer who doesn't have a contract that gives me a fair amount of automatic credibility like these men, I hope in the future to incorporate more references to other films and director/actor histories into my articles so that I can help establish my credibility where it is already so lacking.

And now, the articles:

'Sherlock Holmes'

Guy Ritchie turns the master sleuth into an action hero, with mixed results.

By Kenneth Turan FILM CRITIC

There's a mystery at the heart of "Sherlock Holmes," and it's not the one the great master of detection has been called on to solve. It's how a film that has so many good things going for it has turned out to be solid but not spectacular.

Solid, of course, is more than many studio films can muster these days, but we expect better when we're dealing with the world's greatest consulting detective, someone who has been played by more than 70 actors in something like 200 films, good enough for inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records.

...

It's helpful to add in the brisk style of British filmmaker Ritchie, best-remembered for two of his earlier films, "Snatch" and "Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels." A director with onscreen energy to burn, Ritchie initially has fun with this story of Holmes versus master criminal Lord Blackwood, a man who dabbles in the black arts, says gnomic things like "death is only the beginning" and threatens to end civilization as we know it.

On the other hand, though, all this "new Holmes" talk is something of a smoke screen. What is problematic about the film is not so much the change in character as the change in the nature of the classic Sherlock Holmes vehicle. This Hollywoodized epic has attempted to do too much, has had to serve too many masters. That has, in turn, given the picture an air of trying too hard, which is the one thing Sherlock Holmes should never have to do.

...

The plot itself is promising, starting withLord Blackwood (an excellent Mark Strong) being stopped by Holmes, Watson and Inspector Lestrade (Eddie Marsan) just before he commits a dastardly black-magic deed. Blackwood's apparent ability to cheat death terrifies the metropolis ("London in Terror" headlines obligingly shout), and only Holmes has a chance of figuring out just which game is afoot.

Adding yet another uncertain element to the mix is the appearance of the mysterious Irene Adler, celebrated among Sherlockians as the only woman to fascinate the great detective as well as the only adversary to ever best him. Unfortunately, the usually excellent and very contemporary Rachel McAdams is simply miscast here in a part that cries out for the kind of deeper Victorian soulfulness that someone like Rachel Weisz can project.

More than any one big thing, it is the accumulation of these kinds of small misadventures that trip up "Sherlock Holmes." They so cramp its style that instead of appreciating the good things we've been given, we end up wishing for the film that might have been. It's a mug's game, but currently it's the only one in town.

Sherlock Holmes, review

Guy Ritchie spins a flashy, thunderous, all-action blockbuster around the Victorian super-sleuth and his sidekick.

By Tim Robey

There’s an eccentric touch in the end credits for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes. They’re beautifully done, freeze-framing all the preceding mayhem into elegant graphic stills to recall Sidney Paget’s original magazine illustrations. Then up pops the page for the movie’s literary source – credited to “the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle”. How late can you get? Watching this pumped-up Victorian buddy movie, Doyle might have wondered what mad century he’d stepped into.

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Thanks to Downey, and thanks in surprising part to Ritchie, it’s a totally enjoyable spin on the character – he’s a slovenly headcase who can’t look after himself, not an opium addict but neurotic, perma-bantering student of crime and combat. Jude Law’s pally Watson – a definite plus – is essentially Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon, the stolidly reliable, long-suffering foil to his friend’s quicksilver brilliance. Together, they confront the case of an Aleister Crowley-ish serial killer called Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong, with a wonky front tooth), who is caught, sent to the gallows, pronounced dead, and then does a dastardly Lazarus routine.

...

As usual, Ritchie overdoes the flash; there’s hardly a scene he doesn’t want to edit back to front, and the opening sequence of Blackwood’s capture, which he intends to feel like the overblown finale of a previous case, doesn’t work at all. Still, it’s fun flash, on the whole: powered by Hans Zimmer’s antic score, the movie has a restless, try-it-on quality that keeps you on your toes.

Rachel McAdams, as American femme fatale Irene Adler, feels like very pretty window-dressing, because the script never decides what to do with her beyond setting up the shadowy, sequel-hinting presence of an accomplice called Moriarty. Too often she and Law are competing for scenes. We want more Law! But that’s a fairly sure sign this droll blockbuster has got you on its side.

Every hero needs a sidekick, or three.

No double-brimmed cap, no oversized magnifying glass, no trademark pipe, and heaping amounts of explosions -- this is Sherlock Holmes. While some may be bothered by the lack of classic trademarks in the new film based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s books, this less classically stylized Sherlock Holmes brings out more of the subtle, complex issues of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and of Holmes himself.

Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) is charged in the film with the task of stopping Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) from launching his evil plan into action. Like Blackwood, who is notorious for his mind tricks, Holmes is devoted to getting inside people’s heads. With the aid of director Guy Ritchie (“RockNRolla”, “Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”), Holmes’s wild eyes stare off into the great unknown of human hyperlogic, while chasing down Lord Blackwood through the dark, disorienting and tight-framed cinematography of Victorian London, showing what goes on in the detective genius’s head, and how he gets into other people’s heads.

With its understanding at the mercy of his deductive power, Holmes takes the audience along for a wild, and drug-addled, ride beyond reason and conventional logic to an inevitable, perfectly constructed truth at the end.

This rough-and-tumble comic, dramatic, and adrenaline pumping roller coaster of a film fills the unfortunately bland, and predictable, framework of the classic mystery almost to bursting with the crass, borderline diabolical, and sardonic Holmes that so many have forgotten.

Much like how Holmes and his incredibly able best friend and assistant John Watson (Jude Law) gingerly walk the line between chaos and order, so too does Ritchie walk the line between action flick and dark drama.

Amid the punches and gunshots, Ritchie maintains the substance of the story (screenplay by Anthony Peckham, Michael Robert Johnson and Simon Kinberg) by not making violence the goal, but rather using violence to present obstacles for Holmes to conquer in his attempt to solve the case.

Ritchie balances the well-choreographed action scenes highlight Holmes’s superhero-like reflexes and strength with a romantic subplot that highlights Holmes’s conventional weakness for a woman, Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams), and also his very human fear of losing the best, and possibly the only friend, Holmes has ever had -- Watson. These foibles shed some light into the pitch dark room where Holmes hides for weeks on end, accompanied only by highly dangerous drugs, pondering how to solve his cases, as well as perhaps how to preserve any shred of sanity he has left.

Certainly, these tendencies color Holmes’s reputation as the paragon of mental sharpness, and force the audience to ask whether Holmes would be worth a feature film at all had it not been for the talented support in the script and on screen he receives from Watson and, to an extent, Ms. Adler. Holmes is the film’s namesake, yet the constant presence of sidekicks, who are more his equals than anything, that Holmes is human, and all humans need help from friends.

Film Review: Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes Review

No double-brimmed cap, no oversized magnifying glass, no trademark pipe, and heaping amounts of explosions. While some may be bothered by the lack of Sherlock Holmes trademarks in the new film based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s books, this less classically stylized Sherlock Holmes brings out more of the subtle, complex issues of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and of Sherlock himself. As a detective, Holmes, played by Robert Downey Jr., is entirely devoted to getting inside people’s heads, and together, he and director Guy Ritchie quite successfully used [respectively] wild-eyed faces staring off into the great unknown of human hyperlogic, and dark, occasionally disorienting and tight-framed cinematography to show us a glimpse of what goes on in the detective genius’s head, as well as how Sherlock gets into other people’s heads. The audience’s eyes are forced to rely on Holmes’s deductive power to make sense of the largely messy, chaotic and treacherous landscapes that seem to be the very lifeblood of Holmes’s intellect, not only keeping the audience dependent on Holmes to make sense of things, but also letting the viewers simultaneously get inside Holmes’s head as he gets into others’ heads. As a man who thrives on chaos, his obsession with creating order is fascinating. His violin as his main source of meditation and tool for experimenting with chaos, Holmes takes the audience along for a wild, and occasionally drug-addled, ride beyond reason to a perfectly constructed truth at the end.

Like any mystery, the main character holds the audience’s understanding in its hands. Had Sherlock decided to not tell his viewers how he solved the case, chaos of a rather unpleasant sort would ensue. Much like how Sherlock and his incredibly able best friend and assistant John Watson (Jude Law) gingerly walk the line between chaos and order, so too does Ritchie walk the line between action flick and dark drama.

Amidst the punches and gunshots, Ritchie maintains the substance of the story (written for the screen by Anthony Peckham, Michael Robert Johnson and Simon Kinberg) by not making violence the goal, but rather understood obstructions and obstacles for Holmes to conquer in his attempt to solve the case.

Though the action scenes highlight Holmes’s superhero-like reflexes and strength, Ritchie balances these attributes with a romantic subplot that not only highlights a rather predictable and common weakness for a woman, but one that also highlights his very human fear of losing a best friend, and possibly the only friend Holmes ever has had. These weaknesses make way for noticing some of their more tragic effects, namely total seclusion for weeks on end accompanied only by various highly dangerous drugs.

Certainly these tendencies color Sherlock’s reputation to the audience as the pinnacle of mental sharpness and sanity, though they force the audience to ask whether Sherlock would be worth a feature film at all had it not been for the talented support he receives from Watson and to an extent Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams).