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Kevin Kline plays Cole Porter in De-Lovely
He wrote the soundtrack for the Jazz Age's lost generation. He rubbed shoulders with the likes of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Noel Coward and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was a snappy dresser and one of the brightest American songwriters of the 20th century. But Cole Porter also had an insatiable appetite for sex, and it is his bisexual nature and its relationship to his creative genius that is the angle of De-Lovely, the MGM biography film starring Kevin Kline, coming to home video Tuesday. "I wanted every kind of love that was available, but couldn't find it in just one person, or one sex," Kline-as-Porter says at one point in the film. De-Lovely is about as far removed as possible from the 1946 Warner Bros. biography starring Cary Grant and Alexis Smith, and not just for the inability of a Hollywood screenplay of that day to address gay themes. Director Irwin Winkler and screenwriter Jay Cocks also refused to play by the rules of tradition that dictate the hero must be idealized. Unlike so many of his songs, this Cole Porter is not very joyous, or even very likable. "No, that's one of the things that attracted me to the script," Kline says in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. "It didn't try to -- as so many biopics do -- . . . eulogize the character so that he becomes saintly and not human." Kline says the Grant version (a clip of which is included on the DVD) had Porter writing songs in the trenches in the First World War, when in fact he was never in a trench in his life. "It wasn't a deeply probing psychological portrait of the man." To access this version, the filmmakers opted for a surreal technique that suggests All That Jazz and It's a Wonderful Life with a dash of Dickens's Ghost of Christmas Past. It opens with the angel Gabriel (Jonathan Pryce) overseeing for the newly deceased Porter a fantasy musical production about his life, with each chapter rendered as an impressionistic tableau, set to his many hit songs. Even Kline admitted he wasn't sure at first about the narrative style. "I thought it was unusual," Kline says. "The kind of dialectic between these two men struggling to tell the true story but wanting it to be entertaining and trying to reconcile the self-mythologizing impulse that he had." .
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De-Lovely is first and foremost, though, a love story, between Porter and Linda Lee Thomas (Ashley Judd), the socialite divorcee who became his wife and musical muse. They had a rare understanding within their marriage, that he had to have his gay trysts too, which, even for the amazingly tolerant and understanding Linda, eventually sent her packing. But she was far more than just his beard. When she died, he never wrote another song. Kline feels Porter's voracious approach to life is directly linked to his creativity as it is with so many artists who just don't play by society's normal rules. "There's a self-indulgent aspect to artists, a kind of ego-boundary-shattering (that) allows them to be as creative, as productive, as inventive, but which also brings with it a potentially destructive downside." The film cost only $20 million despite its rich period feel and location sequences in Paris and Venice. Kline says they all took a pay cut, approaching the project as a labour of love. The DVD extras reveal a remarkable behind-the-scenes moment in which Kline is being measured and chalked for his wardrobe. And the tailor is none other than Georgio Armani who, we are told, signed on for free because he loved the fashions of the 1920s and '30s and wanted the challenge of replicating them. Kline says he was flown to Milan twice for his fittings with Armani who, he says, brings to his craft the same meticulous energy and command that Porter did to his music. He agrees that it's not very likely that even a Hollywood movie star could get someone of that stature to whip up a couple of tailor-made personal suits. "In my dreams," he agreed. "You don't normally fly to Milan for costume fittings with Georgio Armani. But I did. Yeah, it was pretty special." Then there was the music, Porter standards like Begin the Beguine, Let's Misbehave, Anything Goes and Night & Day, that tend to stick in the mind for days after viewing the film. They are rendered onscreen by an impressive group of pop singers including Cheryl Crow, Natalie Cole, Robbie Williams and Elvis Costello, as well as Canada's own Diana Krall and Alanis Morissette, who in costume, hairdos and makeup are pretty convincing as Depression-era torch singers. Kline concedes a few purists quibbled about the selection of anachronistic vocalists but he thought it was a real coup. "Each generation should interpret his songs, and so to have contemporary singers doing it, it made it that much more immediate," Kline said. "They all jumped at the opportunity. They all love Cole Porter . . . especially the ones that are songwriters themselves. I mean they can't but appreciate his genius." J. MacKay.
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