Forget all the bad stuff you ever knew about Michael Jackson. Wipe it from your mind. If you happen to be thinking back to the tabloid circus, the PR own-goals and all those eccentric court appearances where he was turning up in his jimmy-jams – those moments that engulfed his later life and tarnished his legacy as a post-racial pin-up and self-appointed King of Pop – then forget it. Never happened. Since Jackson’s death in June of 2009, the shady cabal that is his estate have been on a ruthless mission to salvage his reputation by constantly reminding audiences of the things they love (the music), while expunging anything else that would deter saleability of a personal brand that – against all cultural norms and common sense – remains happily untroubled by so-called “cancel culture”.
In many ways Antoine Fuqua’s jukebox biopic Michael – with its manic mantra of “accentuate the positive!” – could be one of the defining films of the Trump era, with its massaged, soft-focus view of a personal biography that’s been designed to please only those whose love of MJ remains absolute and unhesitating. Like the Orange Homunculus, it’s a film that tells you what it thinks you want to hear, its cooing, passive-aggressive reassurances arrive in the knowledge that, by playing the averages and ignoring the haters, it’s likely to draw a crowd who still blast Jackson’s classic pop standards and believe that any personal malfeasance went with him to the grave.
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What all this means in practice is that you have a movie where over half of its runtime is taken up by extended musical performances, and the actual drama (ie, anything that might cast a dim light on our hero) is kept to a bare minimum. Jermaine Jackson’s son Jaafar Jackson steps into the spangled socks of the title role and – speak as you find – it’s an impressive performance for a debut, achieving more than just body-popping cosplay and an evolution of image. Fuqua is now something of an old-hand, and he brings a level of professional sheen to the proceedings that doesn’t go un-noticed, particularly in his staging of awkward showdowns.
Yet Michael can’t be the bad guy here (or, indeed, display any negative or antisocial traits at all), so it’s his father, Joseph (Colman Domingo), who is tee’d up as the patsy antagonist. The pencil-moustached patriarch rules over the Jacksons with an iron fist, administering whupings on a whim and remaining obsessed with the idea that he was the one who dragged them up out of poverty in Gary, Indiana. The film is so light on criticism of Michael that a supposedly innocent scene of him playing a game of Twister with his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles, suddenly appears strangely suggestive of his later predilections.
The arc takes us from his early successes as cherubic singer for the Jackson 5 through to his attempts to decouple from Joseph’s reign and find his own sound. It’s packed with the usual biopic flim-flam, charting inspirations behind songs and filling in answers to trivial FAQs. Once the money starts rolling in, Michael begins to fill the family’s Encino mansion with wild animals, an act that is framed as being sweetly eccentric and actually seems to suggest that free-roam in a Mediterranean-style mini mansion is what the animals would’ve wanted.
There is special focus placed on scenes of Michael being cordial and loving (in a normal way) towards children, which drop at roughly 20-minute intervals. There are multiple scenes of him visiting hospitals and sitting at the bedsides of ailing youngsters, and major emphasis is placed on his philanthropy. Other than that, we just get lengthy renditions of the songs, some set to live performances, others to snappy, can-do montages. The final act of the film dispenses with dramatic tension and feels like the encore at one of MJ’s oversized stadium shows.
It’s hard to imagine a more superficial and safe film, although there is the suggestion that all the juicy stuff has been compartmentalised and stored up for a possible sequel. If this film is a big box office success – and everything in that respect points to the affirmative – then the Jackson estate will have to ask themselves if it would be possible to spin another rose-tinted fairytale to cover a stretch of Michael’s life where his genius artistry was less front-and-centre. Either way, it’s perhaps one to play in a double bill with the history-polishing 2014 film, United Passions, about the triumphant birth of universally-beloved footballing body, FIFA.