Mapplethorpe (2018)

Mapplethorpe: Directed by Ondi Timoner. With Matt Smith, Marianne Rendón, John Benjamin Hickey, Brandon Sklenar. A look at the life of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe from his rise to fame in the 1970s to his untimely death in 1989.

“Aside from his photography, I knew relatively little about the man himself (apart from his fate) so I was quite looking forward to seeing this. I have seen Matt Smith on stage a few times and he never seems to shy away from a challenging role – yet here, he seems oddly disconnected from the man he is portraying. Physically he looks the part well enough, but somehow he doesnu0026#39;t click. The relationship with Patti Smith (Marianne Rendón) seemed to serve little greater purpose than to tee up his success funded, initially at any rate, but the wealthy Sam Wagstaff (John Hickey) but even I knew that the latter had also funded Smith for a while at the start of her career, so Iu0026#39;m not sure why the evolution of his relationships was quite so statically compartmentalised? What the film does illustrate, however, is a hedonistic lifestyle that clearly fuelled the artistu0026#39;s creativity – and also his demise, and it is also pretty breathtaking to recall that as late as 1990, artists and galleries in the USA were being banned under public decency legislation for creating and displaying images of the male body that thirty years later would probably struggle to raise a 15 rating. A fascinating man, burning the candles at both ends, and hats (and just about everything else) off to Smith for going the role a go – but sadly, this just seems more of a ricochet off his life than a study of it, and that is a shame…”