Jaafar Jackson moves like his uncle and the stage numbers are the real thing; around them, Antoine Fuqua has made an authorised biography that stops the moment the story gets difficult. Watch it for the dancing and expect to argue about the rest.
Antoine Fuqua’s Michael covers the life of Michael Jackson from a childhood in Gary, Indiana, to the early 1980s in 128 minutes, and among its producers is John Branca, who was Jackson’s lawyer and now helps run his estate. Branca is also in the film, played by Miles Teller as the calm man who helps Michael take charge of his own affairs. We mention this early because it explains a good deal of what follows. John Logan’s script is a straightforward rise: a father drills his sons into an act, the smallest son becomes the act, the young man walks away from his father and becomes the most famous performer alive. Then the film stops, some years before the allegations of child sexual abuse that everyone watching knows are coming.
Jaafar Jackson is Michael’s nephew, and the resemblance does the first ten minutes’ work for him. What he does after that is his own. He has the soft speaking voice, the way of ducking his head when praised, the sudden stillness before a move, and when the film lets him dance he does not look like a man copying old footage. The first time the adult Michael takes a stage on his own we sat up and forgot the film around him, and that happened three or four more times before the end. He is the reason the numbers work.
Colman Domingo plays Joseph Jackson as a large, watchful man who believes fear is a teaching method, and he is good at it, sometimes too good; the film needs a villain, hands him the job, and he plays it at a pitch that empties the rest of the house. Nia Long’s Katherine is left to look worried in doorways. Juliano Krue Valdi, as the boy Michael, is the more surprising piece of casting: small, exact and plainly lonely among his brothers. The scenes of him alone after the others have finished are the closest the film comes to saying what it costs to be this good this young.
The music is handled with care and money. Dion Beebe shoots the stage numbers from the floor and the wings, close on feet and hands, and Barbara Ling’s sets move from a small house in Gary to a Motown office to arenas without once looking like a soundstage. Marci Rodgers has put the right clothes in the right year. Four editors are credited, John Ottman, Harry Yoon, Tom Cross and Conrad Buff IV, and we could feel the seam between the numbers, which are cut to the beat and let a move finish, and the scenes between them, which are cut as if someone were checking a list. Lior Rosner’s score has little to do, because the songs are the score.
The problem is not what the film puts in but where it stops. It ends at the point of greatest triumph, and along the way there are several scenes of Michael being kind to children, which the film offers as plain evidence of a good heart. We watched those scenes with a knot in our stomach, and we do not believe that was the intention. A film that knows what its audience knows and stages this anyway is daring us to raise the subject, then leaving before we can. Logan wrote The Aviator, which admired Howard Hughes and showed him falling apart in the same scene; here there is not one line that admits a difficulty.
Fuqua made Training Day, which was about a bad man and knew it. Here he directs as if under instruction. The biopic scaffolding is all up: the record executive (Mike Myers, as Walter Yetnikoff, having a fine time), the studio scenes with Kendrick Sampson’s Quincy Jones, the montage of ascent. Oddly, the business scenes are the most detailed in the film. It is more interested in how Michael took control of his affairs than in what he was like at three in the morning.
The reviews so far are mostly cold, and ours is only a degree or two warmer. If you want to see how the songs were made and how the moves were done, the two hours will give you that, and Jaafar Jackson will give you more. If you want to know who the man was, the film has decided that is a question for a different producer.
