Why do music films so often miss the mark?
By Miles Salter
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed every single one I have seen in the last ten years, from Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocket Man to A Complete Unknown and Elvis. I’ve seen the ‘Bruce is depressed’ movie (Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere), the likeable Robbie Williams romp Better Man and A Star Is Born, but as I got to the end of the Michael Jackson biopic, it dawned on me that most music films don’t work that well, which is a shame. (I don’t include A Complete Unknown which was excellent, and probably the best of the crop.)
Michael takes us on a giddy waltz through Jackson’s strange life. The star is played by Jaafar Jackson, himself a member of the famous clan. The movie begins when Michael is a kid in Gary, Indiana in the late 1960s, being bent to perfection by his father, Joe, a terrifying man played with thuggish determination by Colman Domingo.
Joe had a vision for his kids. He moulded them into lucrative pop stars, but in the process destroyed Michael’s childhood. Michael came to school one day and apologised to his teacher that he’d missed several days of his education – the band had been on tour. Jackson’s later infatuation with all things child-like must surely rest on the fact his own formative years were hugely dysfunctional. While on tour with his brothers, they would have sex with groupies while Michael was in bed in the same room. The film ignores such dark episodes, but it does show the star-to-be being whipped by his father’s belt. Some stories state that Michael was so afraid of his father that he would vomit when the parent came close. This was not a happy childhood.
We roll through The Jackson Five years, then to 1979’s Off The Wall, where Michael works with genius producer Quincy Jones to produce a massive disco-funk record. The follow up, Thriller, was his creative zenith. It brilliantly fused pop, soul, funk and disco and utilised the talents of Quincy, plus a cameo from Paul McCartney. The film shows the recording of Beat It but, alas, there’s no sign of Eddie Van Halen, even if we do hear his famous guitar solo on the song. (Van Halen was never paid for the solo.)
The album yielded seven singles and became the biggest selling album ever. Over forty years after it was released, Billie Jean remains the perfect pop song; an irresistible gem. Jackson was a brilliant dancer and singer, but was it all empty? Suitably, his life is presented in a shallow way. Nothing is fully examined, apart from the nastiness of Jackson senior, and even that feels a bit like watching a pantomime villain.
The two best scenes show the ruthless side of the music industry. After Jackson meets his unsentimental future manager John Branca (played by Miles Teller) in a boardroom, a fax with a single sentence is delivered to Joe, relieving him of his duties. The other scene was when Jackson and Branca go and see Walter Yetnikoff, head of CBS. They insist he has to get Jackson’s videos on MTV, which, amazingly, refused to feature black artists. Yetnikoff, played by Mike Myers in his second role as a music business boss, calls the head of MTV. He threatens to pull all of the top CBS talent from the video channel if Jackson doesn’t get his way. The rest is history.
These scenes stand out because they are more probing than the rest. Jackson is shown as a happy-go-lucky guy, an innocent. He munches popcorn with his mum as they watch Singing In The Rain. He starts a zoo with a monkey and a giraffe. The scene where Jackson and his minder visit a toy store, filling a trolley with playthings, is presented as knockabout fun. He has to sign a bunch of plastic items for fans who are there, but it’s no problem, lovely kind Michael does so with a smile on his face. In reality, it’s a sad or sinister moment. Which grown man wants to purchase loads of toys? Did Jackson have another reason for the purchases?
Given the later allegations that Jackson groomed children and had sexual relationships with them – he faced trial in 2005 but was acquitted, and the documentary Leaving Neverland came out in 2019 with graphic witness statements – some of the scenes make one feel a bit queasy. The brief snatches of Jackson visiting kids in hospital seem dubious, calling to mind Jimmy Savile rummaging through the wards of Stoke Mandeville.
Jackson’s grabbing of his crotch on stage also looks worrying in retrospect. In 1993, La Toya Jackson, Michael’s sister, told a reporter that although she loved her brother, ‘I cannot and will not be a silent collaborator of his crimes against small, innocent children.’ She later retracted her statement. Dan Reed, the man who made Leaving Neverland, has no sympathy. ‘He was a very cruel and selfish man from the evidence I’ve seen,’ Reed said recently.
The set pieces in this film, as in Elvis, work well – brash, colourful, energetic. Most of Michael is well paced and has a good energy, but the final twenty minutes felt slow and somewhat uneventful. The crowds go wild for The Victory Tour, Michael tells his dad he’s going it alone, and we jump to 1988 when the singer performed in London on the Bad tour.
By then, he was already past his best. The horrible 1984 accent that burnt his scalp led to an addiction to painkillers and sedatives. Plastic surgery ruined his once good looks, turning him into a strange looking mannequin. This is a film that recreates concerts and the Thriller video with painstaking accuracy – in the same way that Bohemian Rhapsody did. In the end though, it’s all surface, like most of showbusiness. Something darker is kept from view, like the glittering single glove Jackson wore, hiding the deft fingers that were inside it.
Michael is in cinemas now.