Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Matt Smith, Marianne Rendon, John Benjamin Hickey, Brandon Sklenar, Tina Benko, Mark Moses, Carolyn McCormick, Thomas Philip O’Neill, Mickey O’ Hagan, Anthony Michael Lopez, McKinley Belcher III, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Karlee Perez, David J. Cork, Kerry Butler, Hari Nef, Robert George Siverls, John Bolton, Christina Rouner, Gordon Tashijan, Ruisdael Cintron, Erick Huertas, Rotimi Paul, Karen Oberoi, Tanya Warren, Martin Axon, Glenn Kubota.
No holds barred, nothing censored, no image with our eyes left unseen; if you were to be made the topic of conversation on screen, would you care to see everything you have ever done, every triumph balanced out with all the shocking moments, or would you want it edited, heavily and with mercy.
The world has its icons, larger than life, squeaky clean and highly polished in the digital age, the cracks in the foundations continually smoothed over, PR machines going into overdrive at the merest hint of allegation and rumour. Image is king in the world, almost always false, plastic, soft painted and glossed over. In the world of boundary pushers, few actually push hard enough for fear of seeing their reputation shatter.
Robert Mapplethorpe didn’t just push the boundary, he took a sledgehammer to it and then stopped to photograph the resulting confusion, the beauty of the scene. You either live life or you cower from it, and as the biopic by Ondi Timoner and Mikko Alanne, Mapplethorpe, shows, sometimes in the midst of all that beauty, craving and denial, the boundary pushes back.
Mapplethorpe is brutal, unashamed, towering, sensitive, it is a film that brings into sharp focus the end of the free love era and the consuming AIDS epidemic, the tragedy and the ecstasy in one immense human being. A lover of Pati Smith, Sam Wagstaff and countless others, his true love was the intimacy of the subject he was seeing in his mind and made real by the click of a camera.
Robert Mapplethorpe is arguably a divisive subject, and the film does not hold back on his life, his affairs, the candid nature of search for meaning in an America that had become a canvas but he embraced the point of being alive, he actually did live and die for his art.
With English actor Matt Smith in the title role, and far removed from any part that the more gentle audiences might be comfortable with, Mapplethorpe does not hang back in its appreciation of the man and his legend, neither does it shy away from the controversy; for a life out of focus is no life at all, and Robert Mapplethorpe lived his with all that life could throw at him.
A genuinely superb film, direct and honest, the darkness in the man found to be shyly holding illuminating light and passion. Extraordinary.
Ian D. Hall