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“Always At The Carlyle,” along with Matthew Miele’s recent documentaries (“Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf’s” and “Crazy About Tiffany’s”), confirms the documentarian as a curator of Manhattan taste in a world that is rapidly losing its sense of such enigmatic qualities.
It’s a short walk from the steps of Bergdorf Goodman’s and Tiffany’s to the hallowed Madison Avenue entrance to one of Manhattan’s most lovely Art Deco creations, the 35-story Carlyle Hotel where Princess Diana once slept.
Snugged neatly between 76th and 77th Streets, just north of the Met Breuer [BROY-er] Museum, this New York standard bearer is introduced by tight-lipped but polite hotel staff explaining that discretion protecting their guests is their utmost priority.
So it is that the rich cultural soil is tilled for Miele to gently pull back the curtain on the Carlyle palatial interiors with the generous help of celebrities such as Wes Anderson, Jeff Goldblum, Jon Hamm, George Clooney, Alan Cumming, Tommy Lee Jones, Sofia Coppola, Anjelica Huston, and Elaine Stritch. There isn’t much guilt to the pleasure of watching smart, beautiful entertainers wax poetic about a place that few plebes will ever even catch a wafting scent of fragrance from, but a pleasure it is nonetheless.
Miele’s only misstep comes when he includes an image of the late Michael Jackson entering the hotel’s rumor-free-perimeters with a gaggle of young children wearing masks on their faces. Creepy doesn’t begin to express the chill that the image sends down your spine. As George Clooney says, “many dastardly things” have taking place in the grand hotel where John F. Kennedy is believed to have carried on his affair with Marilyn Monroe.
“Always At The Carlyle” gives you a sense of old New York’s glamour and decadence. The movie is as much a history lesson as it is a celebration of a way of doing business that honors human nature above unbridled greed. You might want to break open your piggy bank to sip a cocktail in Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle after seeing the bar’s enticing atmosphere, complete with a 14K-gold-covered ceiling, on the big screen.
Rated PG-13. 92 mins.
