Love Is the Devil

With apologies to Gene Hackman in Night Moves, viewing John Maybury's Love Is the Devil is like watching a painting dry. A good painting, to be sure -- Francis Bacon, the subject of this tortured and torturing exercise, with his surreal, claustrophobic canvases of human figures as tormented, sentient meat in a compartmentalized hell, may well be the ultimate portraitist of the 20th-century soul.

Much of the effort of Love goes into reproducing the feel of these works (Bacon's estate refused the filmmakers the right to use any of the artist's actual paintings or images), but where Bacon was visionary, terrifying, and precise, Maybury is mannered, indulgent, and irrelevant. As portrayed by Derek Jacobi, the painter is mordant, dapper, and carnally ambivalent. He loathes the flesh but can't pass up a bit of rough trade when it comes tumbling through his skylight in the form of cat thief George Dyer (Daniel Craig). The two form an odd couple, but no matter how much Francis dresses George up or paints his portrait, he can't make him presentable enough for his caustic cadre of artsy pals in the Swinging (here rather umbrous-looking) London of the swinging '60s. As Francis grows in fame, George crumbles into alcoholism, and by the end we are left with just a sour taste of Bacon's nightmare and none of its searing clarity. At the Avon.

-- Peter Keough