We tend to indulge hagiography when it comes to biopics of pop icons. To get the rights to their music, producers often have to let the icons themselves pull the strings. It’s a pact much like the compromises we make all our lives with the music industry – becoming fans of a world riddled with rip-offs, scams and scandals. We’ll only pay to see the film if we’re given the music, as we’re only half-interested in the life.
At the same time, stories of addiction and frailty and romantic fiascos, only to be overcome, are carefully laundered into the movie: they serve to bolster the cool of the icon, and can bond an old artist to a younger, new-revenue public.
Michael is an entire category of its own here. If the average pop biopic is like a guilty trip to a gift shop, this one is a visit to the Parthenon with a 30-foot gold statue of Michael Jackson at one end. The sleaze-free celebration – bloated, shuttered, syrupy and highly crafted – is curated to within an inch of its life, all the weirder since the life in question ended 17 years ago.
According to the New York Times, it’s been put together by Jackson’s cash-needy estate as a riposte to the HBO documentary Leaving Neverland (2019), about the singer’s alleged rampant child-sex abuse. Whether you want to read further into this review may depend on whether you think such allegations need to be proved beyond all reasonable doubt to be credible.
Michael has a gauziness even at its start in a snowy Gary, Indiana, in 1966, where the ogre-ish Joseph Jackson, a steelworker, drills performance discipline into a boy band made up of five of his nine surviving children. Joseph (Colman Domingo) is a brutal visionary with a cold, faraway look in his eyes, a bit like the tennis dad who moulded the Williams sisters in King Richard, but less larky. The tiny prodigy Michael (an excellent and worryingly hard-working Juliano Valdi) is soon crooning love songs in front of a three-foot mic stand and blowing kisses to adoring crowds while somehow sweeping the floor with both feet at once, as though they’re the broom of the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia.
“I’m not a kid anymore,” announces the high-tenor voice of the adult Michael (played by Jackson’s nephew, Jaafar Jackson) about 20 minutes later. We then start a rattle-through of newspaper-feature-like anecdotes touching on events of the 1970s and 1980s, but not explaining much – centred on the making of three mega-hit solo albums, Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad. Joining the Jackson household, now re-located to California, are a chimp, a llama, a snake and even a giraffe – close companions to Michael that emphasise his extreme social isolation.
The other Jackson brothers mostly appear as a performing wodge. La Toya pops up briefly and there’s no sign anywhere of Janet. Lurking behind everything is puppet-master Joseph, and Domingo’s rich, rampaging performance eats up most of the movie’s thin oxygen. In contrast to recent biopics of Bruce Springsteen and Robbie Williams, we don’t get a fully rooted relationship with the wayward dad, who inveigles his way back into his son’s management even after Jackson has hooked up with a new handler, the genial John Branca (one of the film’s producers, blandly played by Miles Teller). Beatific mum Katherine (Nia Long) offers a certain amount of docile resistance to Joseph, but perhaps doesn’t help things by talking about Michael as some kind of holy child.
Mike Myers offers a mildly amusing cameo as a record executive who gets Jackson’s videos onto the early, whites-only MTV via some vulgar language that will have won the film its 12A certificate. The movie-of-the-week script offers little irony, save in one scene where the adult Michael insists to Joseph how grown-up he is in his bedroom full of soft toys.
Maybe director Antoine Fuqua sneaked that past the estate guards. Fuqua, a filmmaker known for action thrillers like Training Day made with an icepick intensity, pours most of his effort into performance set pieces showcasing Jackson’s inarguably tidal talent. It appears to be Jackson’s original voice on most of the tracks, however much they’ve been re-engineered. His vocal coming up over the end of Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solo on “Beat It” reminds us of a high point of 1980s pop, and most won’t have heard the track full blast in a scaled-up venue for a while.
Fuqua also gives us an electrifying stage performance of “Billie Jean”, and at the end creates peak frenzy at a 1988 Wembley concert (reminiscent of the close-out of the Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody). Bubbles the monkey, on the other hand, is rendered with ludicrously poor CGI, despite visual effects mobilised on a Marvel scale to create animals, concerts and (presumably) Jackson’s cinched-in nose.
News reports say that the film was originally intended to run into the 1990s and show Jackson being extorted by the early sex accusers. But the released version barely shows him hanging out one-on-one with kids. Even without the grooming claims, it’s striking how Jackson’s spot on the coolness index plummeted within a decade, leading to Jarvis Cocker’s situationist sabotage of his act at the Brits in 1996.
Michael thinks how enchanting it was that Jackson never fully gave up childhood, but there are some things children do that aren’t so great, such as whine a lot – a key element in this script, in the absence of any meaningful relationships for the star. Jackson’s true grip on reality is never made clear in Jaafar Jackson’s mostly wan scenes – whether he ever realised that Neverland was just a legend in a book.
This may be the first and only pop biopic without any romantic or carnal activity at all, so “intimacy co-ordinator” is a role omitted in the endless closing credits of the $155 million production. In effect, though, the entire platoon of producers and executive producers – several of them from the Jackson clan – serve jointly as the picture’s intimacy police.
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