de-lovely

I haven't written much about movies lately because frankly I only seen a few popular hits that have not stirred me to comment about them.
 
De-Lovely is the bio pick about Cole Partner starring Kevin Kline as the master American songwriter/composer and Ashley Judd plays his wife Linda.  De-Lovely has the sort of free-flowing structure seen more often in contemporary plays than in movies.  In fact, I felt at times as if I were in the up close and claustrophobic smallness of the live theater.  Many times the beginning and ending of scenes were located on an actual stage.
 
Jonathan Pryce is God, or the Death Angel, (we never quite know who he is, but he plays the convention well) come to pick-up Porter at the end of his life, emceeing important details  of Porter's story set around his music.  It is the music that saves the movie, and that emphasis is right.  Try to forget Night and Day's tune bouncing around your head in the hours after seeing this movie.  Hard to do.
 
Sometimes the music is presented naturally, with Porter playing a piano at a cocktail party.  Other time's the characters break out into a song and dance number as about as natural as that found in movie musicals.  Suddenly Porter vamps with Louis B. Mayer on M-G-M's studio lot, singing in a vaudvillian production of Be a Clown, an oddly winning bit of incredulity.
 
Several popular singers perform the Porter standards, often in their own style, not attempting to give a historical version of the song.  Good choice.  I'd rather hear interpretive cabaret than the Minnie Mouse sounds of the 20s and 30s.  Listening to a good cabaret singer forces the listener to consider the singer's interpretation on top of whatever original context the song had in a musical.  Porter's songs, like those of Sondheim, lend them to that kind of re-interpretation.
 
The bittersweetness of Porter's tunes is evident in the facts of his life.  The words Advertising young love for sale take on a different a slightly different context when accompanied with a montage of Porter dalliances with paid young men.  And Anything Goes  feels like stale bubbly as we begin to see the decline of the Porter's relationship with his wife. 
 
What to do if one was homosexual, or around somebody who was homosexual?  A mystery is as good a word as any other to describe the delicate balancing act of the closeted early and mid 20th century.   Some people were good at it, others were not (see Lorenz Hart).  Many in the upper classes tolerated the mystery.  Porter evidently lived his dual life without breaking a sweat, at least at first, and then his relationship fell apart and he ended up breaking his legs in a horse riding accident.  The build up to that moment had the classic feel of a big ole cautionary tale, a convention of most bio pics.  As unconventional as the story is told, this part seemed right out of made-for-tv movies.  
 
Kline carries off the devil may care aspect of Porter's black tie cocktail party persona, but he also appears a bit foggy, as if he never quite understood the balancing act between gay desire and companionship with his wife.
 
It's easy to forgive Kline this fog, because the movie never settles on a point of view, either from Porter or his wife.  Poor Ashley Judd, a beautiful actress, is left to wringing her hands in a series of scenes, frowning as the years pass and the reality that her deal with Porter, accepting his homosexual liaisons, was indeed painful.
 
But that's about all we know about her.  Wasted part.  Kline as the elder Porter looks a lot like Bill Murray.