Where did Michael Jackson’s high-pitched, whispery speaking voice come from? Did he ever struggle with the massive weight of near-universal fame? How significantly, or even consciously, did he mourn a childhood stolen from him?
Also: did Janet Jackson actually exist?
If you’d like to learn all this and more … well, don’t bother watching Antoine Fuqua’s new biopic/hagiography, Michael. Because, instead of engaging with the fraught backstory of one of the most famous men to ever live, audiences get toe-tapping entertainment value and an impressive impersonation by nephew Jaafar Jackson at the expense of virtually any investigation into the mind and motivations of its eponymous star.
You could blame legal issues for the surface-level replay of the iconic King of Pop’s life: While an initial, longer cut of the film both started and ended with allegations of sexual abuse from a 13-year-old boy, the fine print of a settlement between the Jackson family and the young accuser barred his depiction in film.
Late-stage reshoots focused solely on MJ’s rise as an eight-year-old wunderkind to the heights of his fame decades later, with an ending situated years before any serious allegations surfaced.
WATCH | Michael biopic trailer:
Other historically important figures, such Kat Graham’s portrayal of Diana Ross, were similarly cut for legal reasons. The reshoots reformed what Fuqua initially intended to operate as an explicit exoneration of MJ into something less directly controversial, if now completely thematically inert.
The complete and bizarre omission of Michael’s sister Janet, meanwhile, was reportedly at her own request — a rejection that may prove to be a smart artistic and reputational decision.
Because in place of introspection, Michael occasionally brushes past themes sure to raise eyebrows, only to obstinately refuse to explore them. With these obvious and intentional omissions, Fuqua’s Michael plays all the hits and none of the duds of MJ’s career and life.
By the time the sequel-teasing credits roll, it almost feels as if this was by design. As if all those triumphs were spliced together to prove Leaving Neverland director Dan Reed’s take on why audiences are not bothered by the allegations of child sexual assault that his documentary so uncomfortably levied.
Because, he argued, MJ won the PR campaign. He says “people just don’t care” and would much rather do the Thriller dance than think about the complicated and potentially legend-shattering complications of an actual human being.
Though to be fair, Michael Jackson was acquitted on all criminal charges of sexual assault. His estate has consistently and vociferously denied any allegations of impropriety — calling Reed’s film “a complete fiction” that was “completely one-sided.”
But to be even more fair, this filmic response is, at best, completely one-sided in the other direction. Nearly every character is boiled down to either a one-dimensional saint, the equivalent of jokey name-drop (including an awkwardly offhand origin story for LaToya Jackson’s seeming fascination with snakes) or simply excluded to please everyone’s agents.
Not that Michael is uniquely unoriginal; instead, it does what the music biopic is increasingly designed to do. That is, turn their heroes into Jesus.
It’s a failing seen in Bob Marley: One Love, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, partially defied in Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown but now back in Michael. That in the unfortunately audience-appetizing world of “authorized” biographies, you’re more likely to encounter brand-management than incisive and honest character examinations.
This one relies on the narrative of a pure-hearted, unflaggingly self-sacrificing genius — nearly killing himself in trying to soothe a damaged world through the gift of his divine talents. Michael visits more sick children in hospitals than we can count. Childhood Michael (played with incredible proficiency by Arco‘s Juliano Krue Valdi) croons I’ll Be There to a crying young girl in a wheelchair — whose appreciative, tear-stained face comes to fill the whole frame in a way that feels crassly heavy-handed.
In this telling, warring factions of Crips and Bloods are united in affectionate togetherness solely through the dulcet tones and awesome choreography of Beat It.
These are, to be clear, more-or-less factual events. But they perhaps happened a little less happy-go-luckily than Fuqua’s vision (according to music video director Bob Giraldi, the Beat It shoot specifically nearly devolved into a crime scene).
Other memorable life events are either nowhere to be found, or are touched on so glancingly they require an encyclopedic Jackson knowledge to pick up on — like the supposedly sustained jealousy and rivalry between Michael and brother Jermaine, or their mother’s multiple attempted divorce proceedings due to husband Joe Jackson’s infidelity.
Unanswered questions
Some questions are hinted at, then dropped to shoehorn in yet another song. Will Fuqua suggest young MJ was so disinclined to meet his father’s eyeline because he was on the autism spectrum? Did he affect his high-pitched speaking voice in a deliberate attempt to bolster his fame through fabricated mystique?
And, of course, there’s the dearth of any examination (or even attempted refutation) of Michael’s attitudes and behaviour toward children and childhood, despite children — and the repeated motif of Peter Pan and Neverland — popping up so often it can’t help but feel intentional.
But why bother making an MJ movie uninterested in crafting actual multi-dimensional characters — save for Colman Domingo’s fascinatingly evil (and safer to vilify) patriarch, Joe Jackson?
If you were to ask James Baldwin in 1985, there is a cultural reason to push back on “Wacko Jackson” characterizations. A recognition that Black people — and the gender-nonconforming — have historically been seen as so antithetical to the American ideal, that a reckoning on the most successful artist of all time (who also happened to be Black) necessarily becomes “not about Jackson at all.”
Instead, it becomes a referendum on whether Black people deserve to be thought of as humans.
“All that noise is about America, as the dishonest custodian of Black life and wealth; the Blacks, especially males, in America; and the burning, buried American guilt,” he wrote in an essay before serious allegations of sexual abuse were raised.
“Freaks are called freaks and are treated as they are treated — in the main, abominably — because they are human beings who cause to echo, deep within us, our most profound terrors and desires.”
So maybe, Fuqua’s Michael maintaining what Paris Jackson described as the “fantasy” of her father’s life, is in some ways performing a larger service. But when dealing with a star as multi-faceted and complex as MJ, says Globe and Mail critic Sarah-Tai Black, offering up nothing more than shallow fan service perpetuates a continuing defensiveness at odds with true art.
“The Black community — a lot of the time, we like to protect men in power,” Black said, pointing to the anti-Blackness Michael faced throughout his career — but also Fuqua’s complete refusal to even investigate any negative aspects of his character.
“Storytellers have a responsibility to audiences … to try to grapple with difficult things. To not just give us stories and neat, tidy packages that really conveniently gloss over histories of alleged harm and violence and abuse.”
