De-Lovely

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * )

To declare an interest: I've long felt that simply having written the words and music to the lines "how strange the change from major to minor / Every time we say goodbye" is enough to have earned Cole Porter a place in the artistic pantheon of the 20th century.

That line - well, everything that Porter wrote, actually - was rich in a quality in dismally short supply in this reverential, valiant but ultimately lifeless biopic: a sense of style delivered with a nonchalance that make the artistry invisible.

De-Lovely, which takes its title from one of those songs ("It's de-lightful, it's de-licious, it's de-lovely") isn't even easy to sing along with. A dozen classics are covered by modern artists (Robbie Williams, Elvis Costello, Alanis Morissette, Natalie Cole) in those kind of knowing, look-at-me versions that made the tribute album a staple of the 90s (Sheryl Crow's bizarre, minor key version of Begin the Beguine is most hideous of many renditions that allow current stars to cosy up to Porter's genius while somehow contriving to obscure it).

Winkler, best known as a producer (all the Rocky films), and writer Jay Cocks (a former Time film critic who wrote The Age Of Innocence and Gangs of New York for Martin Scorsese) clearly have pretensions to biographical accuracy: it alludes often to Porter's homosexuality which was entirely absent from the 1946 saccharine Night and Day with Cary Grant.

But it does so with a nauseating coyness. "I wanted every kind of love that was available, but I could never find them in the same person or the same sex," Kline sighs at one point and his sexual escapades are slyly referred to as "other interests".

Still the fact that it's acknowledged makes it possible to appreciate anew that the songs were not necessarily always about heterosexual romance. Titles like Experiment or Love for Sale (the latter provocatively asking: "who'd like to sample my supply?") are allowed to possess a pungent double entendre.

But it's about the only pungency the film displays. Kline, a genuinely likeable and always self-effacing actor, struggles manfully with the stilted dialogue through a succession of scenes which dutifully tick off key episodes but never achieve anything like a plausible emotional coherence.

He can play the piano a bit, too, which helps, and the sequences in which he conjures magic at the keyboard, a cigarette burning in the ashtray and bottle of Scotch always at hand, are among the film's most quietly impressive.

For the rest, Judd's turn as Cole's lifelong love Linda is opaque and cameos of Irving Berlin and Louis B. Mayer arrive and depart almost unnoticed. Worst is the dreadful contrivance of having Porter taken by a man called Gabe (Pryce, who doesn't need a sign around his neck saying "Death" for us to know who he is) to watch rehearsals for a musical that purports to survey his career.

It looks like a bad rerun of This is Your Life. And you emerge from it knowing that, no matter what really happened, this life just wasn't like that.

CAST: Kevin Kline, Ashley Judd, Jonathan Pryce
DIRECTOR: Irwin Winkler

RUNNING TIME: 125 mins

RATING: Screening: Rialto