'De-Lovely' de-lightful, but depressing

With a flawless, let's-nominate-him-for-something performance by Kevin Kline, and an ingenious framing structure which features the best songs of composer Cole Porter, I have to ask why this movie had to make me so damned depressed.\n"De-Lovely," Irwin Winkler's biopic of Cole Porter, is appropriately equal parts drama and musical. Porter's life was, after all, equal parts everything. He attended and threw ritzy parties; he lived in Europe, New York and Hollywood. His fascinating relationship with his wife Linda (a strong performance by Ashley Judd) could be described as platonic at best; they loved each other on a deeper level, and although he belonged to her in the day hours, she openly accepted his homosexuality and let him have the night for himself.\nThe movie shows they didn't have a perfect relationship. It was strained, as all relationships can be, with pangs of jealousy, loneliness and emptiness. Overall, it's far too peppy for a drama and far too glum for a musical, and how this affects the audience is a sort of empathy rarely performed well in a movie.\nWinkler and his screenwriter, Jay Cocks, seem only interested in the mysticism of the relationship between Cole and Linda (the film's beginning is when they first meet in Paris in the 1920s). It works, but I think it is burdened with the ever-present feeling of incompletion. To Cocks' credit, the movie is written wonderfully, containing punchy, witty dialogue not unlike the punchy, witty lyrics Porter used so often in his songs. \nThe movie is, however, a fantastic showcase for Porter's stellar resume of songs, many of which you automatically recognize even if you didn't know it was Porter who wrote them. Here they are given perfect lip service and sung by the likes of Natalie Cole, Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow, Diana Krall, Alanis Morissette and Robbie Williams. It is in this wonderful series of musical interludes that the movie finds its true strength. \nIt's unquestionable to me that over the years the musical has clearly changed, and I'd argue it's improved for the better. Today musicals have abandoned their formulaic days of the 1940s and 1950s, and they are now seamless and engaging pieces of cinema, multifaceted and complex, not just a quick pick-me-up on an overcast day. It's why "De-Lovely" is entertaining but still bleak -- it's a truly grown-up musical with a buffet of emotions to experience.