Michael Is a Botched Job

Bubbles doesn’t look right. The new Michael Jackson biopic, Michael, renders the singer’s pet chimp in CGI, and the result is even creepier than the famous Jeff Koons sculpture it evokes. His eyes bulge like Gollum’s, and he moves like a deepfake. The “performance” contributes to the already overwhelming strangeness of this movie about one of music’s most vexing questions: Who was Michael Jackson, really?

Any film attempting to answer that was going to face some challenges. When the 2019 HBO documentary Leaving Neverland aired allegations by two men who say the late singer abused them as kids—charges his representatives contested—the world was made to ask whether it should or even could “cancel” an artist so embedded in our collective memory and prom playlists. The Jackson estate got to work on a cultural counteroffensive, bolstering attempts to celebrate Michael’s songbook while downplaying his admitted habit of sharing beds with boys (for example, by backing a bouncy Broadway musical set before any accusations were made public). The problem with that tactic, Michael shows, is that his life’s story is, glaringly, about the corruption of childhood.

Conceived by the Bohemian Rhapsody producer Graham King and directed by Antoine Fuqua, a veteran of slickly satisfying music videos and action films, Michael prances through the expected steps of a biopic. The movie begins with its hero’s struggles as the youngest member of the Jackson 5, a band of brothers abused into excellence by their father, Joe (played by Colman Domingo). It extends that trial into adulthood as Michael wrestles control of his career away from his dad. Along the way, masterpieces are made, gloves are bedazzled, moons are walked. But the self-actualization quest is a sideshow to a more interesting subject: Michael’s eccentricities, which the film is luridly fascinated by yet too timid to address honestly.

Early parts of the film show Michael’s extreme talent setting him apart in ways good and bad. When Joe whips young Michael (played movingly by Juliano Valdi) in front of his brothers, the violence creates a uniquely horrible sound: that virtuosic voice, squealing in pain. One strong scene has Michael in the recording booth, crooning Smokey Robinson’s “Who’s Lovin’ You.” The camera holds on the face of Motown founder Berry Gordy as he experiences astonishment and—maybe—a hint of alarm at how well this tyke is embodying lyrics about grown-up lust and jealousy.

The adult Michael is played by the real Michael’s nephew, Jaafar Jackson. He nails the sunshiny lilt and bright-eyed mannerisms that read—even all these years later—as too earnest to be real. As Michael moves into solo stardom and makes cunning business moves, the film captures how his seemingly naive idealism was also a form of ambition. Michael wrote inspirational advice to himself on sticky notes. He said out loud that he was the greatest of all time. He had a jejune fantasy of what a life in music could be, and he made it a reality.

He did that by, as the film’s best moments depict, pouring that same fantasy into his art. Thriller’s conception is rendered as excitingly—if hokily—as anyone could ask for. A montage intercuts studio work with clips of monster movies Michael watched on TV. At the title track’s video shoot, Michael gives directorial instructions in full ghoul makeup. Again, Fuqua pulls the biopic trick of showing the faces of onlookers as they recognize genius in real time. Again, the trick works by making Michael’s work—as familiar as it may be to most viewers—inspire new awe.

Michael’s personal life was also steeped in make-believe. From his childhood, he treated animals as if they were people—a tendency that at first seems adorable but, as the movie goes on, becomes surreal and unsettling. In key scenes, you might catch a giraffe milling outside a window, or a snake slithering on a couch. Michael’s Peter Pan syndrome is no mere subtext: Years before he founds his amusement-park-like estate, Neverland Ranch (which is not in the movie), he’s shown obsessing over J. M. Barrie’s classic book. A drawing of the elfin Peter even inspired him, the film strongly implies, to get his first nose job.

Yes, the nose jobs—plural—are in the movie. As Michael ascends in fame, he bandages and re-bandages himself, and his appearance keeps shifting. An accident at a Pepsi ad shoot causes his scalp to catch fire, and in playing that moment for as much tragedy as possible, the film all but labels Michael’s life as a gothic-horror tale of body transformation. A full hagiography might downplay that theme, but Fuqua seems to understand he’s working with potentially dynamite material here. (Then again, Michael’s body dysmorphia—at one point he complains about his facial symmetry—no longer seems as unusual as it once did.)

Unfortunately, Michael is a botched job. After Fuqua does interesting work sowing seeds of folly amid the star’s glorious rise, the movie gives up and turns to total sanctification. The plot beats late in the film include him donating money to a hospital, selflessly agreeing to tour with his brothers, and—for the very end of the movie—putting on two scintillating concerts, in basically back-to-back scenes. The movie ends in 1988 as Michael kicks off the tour for his hit album Bad. HIS STORY CONTINUES reads a title card. Well, yeah—and we all know how.

[Read: The missing piece of the Bob Marley biopic]

The reason for the abrupt finale is astonishing. Apparently, the filmmakers meant to address the first sexual-abuse allegation leveled against Michael, in 1993, which he disputed and ultimately settled out of court. Fuqua even shot scenes of the FBI raiding Neverland. But then the estate realized that the decades-old settlement with the accuser forbade any party from depicting that situation for commercial purposes. An entire third act had to be scrapped, though tentatively planned sequels may address the decades in which Michael’s image curdled for good.

This behind-the-scenes drama is not simply one of the great oopsies of Hollywood history—it’s also a reminder of the agendas at play. Previous versions of the script depicted the case against the singer as being a shakedown, according to The New York Times. Michael’s projected box-office success—and boost to the late star’s image—may help fund efforts to erase all of the allegations from public memory. Already, a lawsuit settlement with the estate has caused HBO to stop streaming the damning and persuasive Leaving Neverland. (The suit was predicated on a technicality: The network signed a non-disparagement agreement with Michael in the ’90s when it bankrolled a concert film.)

Michael’s commercial reception may seem to show the futility of trying to litigate truth regarding someone as once-beloved as its subject. Yet the film’s obvious propagandistic tone really suggests the opposite: The question of what to do about figures like him is still very much in play. The ongoing outcry surrounding Jeffrey Epstein is on some level a reckoning with the scourge of child abuse and the impunity of the elites. So is the conversation about—if not the legal facts regarding—Diddy. Americans know that the power we give certain individuals makes the most vulnerable among us unsafe. And we seem to be craving a way to change that.

An honest accounting of Michael’s life could help answer how. Fuqua’s film understands how precious childhood is, and the way that harsh treatment and rigid social expectations can mangle a young person’s outlook on life. It even seems to understand that money and power can compound those wounds in dangerous ways. In spite of itself, the film comes very close to saying something true. Instead, it opts for a fairy tale—an unconvincing version of the wild and real.