JOHN PODHORETZ: Michael — The Michael Jackson biopic gives new meaning to the word ‘sanitizing.’
The movie concludes with Michael having liberated himself from Joseph’s tyranny and, now free to be truly himself, burning down the joint as he performs “Bad” at a concert in London in 1988. But this was not the original ending, according to the peerless Hollywood reporter Matt Belloni. As filmed, the last third of Michael centered on the child-molestation and rape accusations against Jackson that dominated the 1990s—but not in a way intended to complicate or deepen the movie’s portrait of its subject.
Rather, Michael was designed to exculpate Jackson and thereby fulfill the purpose that the Jackson estate wants it to fulfill—to wash away the controversies surrounding him even now, 17 years after his death, and elevate the most talented and successful pop performer of his generation to the historical pantheon of great-souled and flawless human beings. To that end, the original cut featured harsh portrayals of his accusers and their families as money-grubbing charlatans and Jackson himself as entirely innocent of the charges.
Belloni discovered that, in the enthusiasm for getting the project off the ground, someone on the production team forgot to do due diligence. It turned out that a key element of the gigantic cash settlement between Jackson and one of his accusers was that Jackson (or his estate) was enjoined from making any effort to offer any kind of portrayal of the case whatsoever—otherwise the agreement would be considered breached and the case opened anew. So they had to rejigger the ending.
And lucky for them—for producer Graham King, for screenwriter John Logan, and for director Antoine Fuqua—that they did so. Had they made the original version, people under the age of 30 largely unaware of Jackson’s almost unimaginably repugnant behavior would have had to confront some aspect, any aspect, of Jackson’s life that might have discomfited them.
Sonny Bunch adds: Michael Review — Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Saint MJ.
Confronted with an unreleasable nine-figure investment, producers Graham King (Bohemian Rhapsody) and John Branca (MJ’s real-life lawyer), along with director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), scrambled to salvage the movie, and the resulting picture is . . . odd. What we’re left with is a biopic that has been stripped of nearly all dramatic tension, a chronicle of a, perhaps the, pop star’s rise . . . and rise . . . and rise. One that is rinsed in a beatific glow of childlike wonder, angel-voiced innocence. One that undeniably makes you want to dance in your seat because whatever Michael Jackson’s sins, he was a magnetic performer with an almost-unmatched back catalogue. One that almost feels as if it’s trolling those who hope a picture like this might honestly examine some of the thornier sides of Jackson’s life.
Rather than the sexual abuse investigation, Michael is now bookended by a performance of “Bad” in London. In between, we see the aforementioned endless rise. As the youngest member of the Jackson 5, Michael (played as a child by Juliano Valdi) is both obviously the best singer and the best dancer. And yet, he is treated horribly by his father, Joseph (Colman Domingo), constantly beaten with belts and made to sing long past the point of exhaustion. The hard work pays off and soon the boys are at Motown, where Berry Gordy (Larenz Tate) is a sort of surrogate father figure for Michael, indulging his questions about production and mixing, telling him he has the best voice he’s ever heard.
The Jackson 5 surge to the top of the charts and we see and hear them play a bunch of of their best numbers, like “ABC.” The songs, the hits: This is the part of the movie that’s easy as 123, do-re-mi. It’s why, frankly, producer King needed the help of Branca and the Jackson family: Without the hits, there’s no movie. What’s the point of a Michael Jackson biopic if you’re not going to have an older Michael (played as an adult by Jaafar Jackson, MJ’s nephew via his brother, Jermaine) singing “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” and “Beat It” and “Thriller” and “Billie Jean”?
This is why, for most filmgoers, it will not matter that the film is completely lacking in dramatic tension, that the only thing we are left wondering is why anyone, anywhere, denies Michael a single thing. Fuqua, an accomplished action director who has made, among other films, the Equalizer series, Olympus Has Fallen, and Tears of the Sun, leans on his music-video roots here, shooting Jaafar with an eye for the kineticism that was key to MJ’s success. Michael’s movements were like a magic trick: Even if you’re not a student of dance (and Lord knows, I am not), you can’t help but gawk. MJ’s nephew does a more-than-serviceable job of mimicking his fluidity, and whatever studio magic they’ve used to recreate Jackson’s vocal stylings works.
As Julie Burchill writes with a tongue-in-cheek headline, “Don’t whitewash Michael Jackson.”
Now, a new film, Michael, starring Jackson’s nephew Jaafar (which seems non-specifically slightly creepy), backed by the Jackson estate and using Jackson’s original vocals, seeks to further this process; in the Times of London, Kevin Maher writes of it that: “Future cultural historians will look back on this Michael Jackson biopic as a watershed moment for the genre. It will be known as that infamous film in which the subject became completely untethered from reality and the film delivered instead two hours of pure and unadulterated bullshit. That’s as defined by the American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt in his essay On Bullshit, as speech intended to persuade without any regard for truth.”
It does sound dreadful. Jackson is portrayed as a cross between St Francis of Assisi and Princess Diana, told by his mother as a child that the Lord has blessed him with a “special light.” Galvanized by seeing a young fan in a wheelchair, he’s soon haunting children’s hospitals, which with hindsight seems more Jimmy Savile than Diana Spencer. The producer claims that it aims to “humanize but not sanitize” Jackson, but conveniently it stops in 1988, before the accusations of child abuse started. Maher concludes: “The music scenes nonetheless are quite brilliant and thrilling …Jackson was a once-in-a-generation genius and his musical legacy is quite safe, his sales spiked by 10 percent during the Leaving Neverland controversy. In the end he probably deserved more, for better and worse, than this.”
Conveniently, my relationship with Jackson’s oeuvre is rather like the film’s; I stopped being a fan as he grew paler and frailer and utterly bereft of the exuberance which he had as a youngster. As he became more famous, the more he wore the Emperor’s New Clothes in my eyes; at his best, he could serve up a decent slice of pop-soul, but that was largely because he had the supreme producer Quincy Jones to work his magic. Done up like Liberace auditioning for the Black And White Minstrels, yelping and jerking and grabbing at his genitalia in a way that seemed to signify alarm rather than arousal, it all looked weirdly like the male equivalent of a little girl in her mother’s high heels.
But I’m not sure if any of that matters for the filmmakers — who likely have a hit on their hands, what between the theatrical release, its coming endless stay on streaming platforms, and like many rock and pop films, the soundtrack sales. Bunch concludes that Michael “is a rather straightforward celebration of Michael Jackson’s music, one designed to get people dancing in the aisles and singing along with the script. I have no doubt it will be an enormous hit: The paying audience I saw it with loved it from start to finish.”
Exit quote: “Most movies about musicians follow an artist’s rise, fall and eventual redemption. ‘Michael’ is all rise — the ascension of a holy being to the top of the universe. The movie ends in 1988 with Jackson’s triumphant solo ‘Bad’ tour, which is kind of like ending an O.J. Simpson biopic with him winning the Heisman Trophy.”
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