‘Michael’ review: A bland biopic and a soulless PR exercise

It’s telling that one of the producers of Michael is John Branca, an entertainment lawyer and co-executor of the Michael Jackson estate, played in the film by Miles Teller. This feels like a film produced by a lawyer—a soulless document sure, but one that’ll hold up in court. Another producer is Graham King, the man behind Bohemian Rhapsody. That this 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic was directed, for the most part, by Bryan Singer, accused multiple times of sexual assault, had no visible bearing on its box office. And King has good reason to hope that the allegations of child sexual abuse against Michael Jackson won’t dent the success of this new biopic.

Michael is an abjectly bad movie, but that’s secondary. It’s an act of moral cowardice—of its makers and backers but also potentially of a viewing public that, as of opening weekend, seems fine with its existence (it’s off to record start at the box office both in the US and abroad). The Jackson estate, the producers, director Antoine Fuqua and writer John Logan are betting that viewers don’t believe—or don’t care about—the many allegations of molestation and grooming levied against Jackson. All they need to do is fashion a film in which these matters don’t surface, where Jackson is a saint, and where his only underage companion is a chimpanzee.

In dour Gary, Indiana in 1966, Joe Jackson (Colman Domingo) whips—quite literally—his five sons into shape for their first performance as a band. Michael, the youngest at 10, is the star singer, with a guileless, agile voice. The Jackson 5 rise steadily, sign with Motown, become a sensation. It’s clear from the start that this is Michael’s reflected glory; his mother (Nia Long) even spells it out, telling him she always knew he was different from his siblings. The elder brothers—Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Jackie—don’t even register as personalities; the film couldn’t care less about them, or about his sister, La Toya.

As Michael enters his teens (Jaafar Jackson, Jermaine's real-life son, takes over from Juliano Krue Valdi), he chafes at Joe’s domineering presence. Their fracturing relationship is the sum total of the film’s attempts at a central conflict. You’d expect something at least on the level of King Richard, in which Will Smith’s dad runs his daughters ragged to make them champions, from John Logan, writer of Any Given Sunday, Gladiator and The Aviator. But Joe turns out to be an unworthy opponent, increasingly ineffectual as Michael becomes a superstar and starts to shut him out.

If Logan phoning it in is disappointing, it's unlikely anyone had great hopes from Antoine Fuqua, a journeyman’s journeyman. The film has all the excitement of paid promotion, scene after scene of embarrassing praise for Michael the musical artist, the dancer, the philanthropist. There’s no insight into his creative process; the songs seem to arrive fully formed (Quincy Jones exists in the film, but not as a meaningful collaborator). There’s a sequence where Michael, having seen reports of LA gang wars on TV, summons rival Bloods and Crips members to the studio, where he engineers peace by getting them to dance together for his ‘Beat It’ music video. Fuqua’s direction of this is hokey, but more revealing is the moment where Michael invents the famous dance move where he shrugs his jacket. He does it perfectly first time. No trial and error, no adjustment, no sense of Michael as a hardworking, meticulous artist. Whether Jaafar would’ve been up to portraying any nuances is a different question—he strikes me as a good mimic but a limited actor, too needy, too mindful of the camera’s gaze.

There have been few genres more dispiriting in recent years than the Hollywood musical biopic. Even competent ones like A Complete Unknown end up feeling parodic and airless, hampered by legal wrangles and hero worship. Michael recreates key moments from its subject's life without bringing any insight to them; even fan service should have some imagination. Fuqua ends his film with a massive concert, Jackson running through the hits. To regard Bohemian Rhapsody, which had a similar final act, as something worth emulating rather than an expensive pile of garbage is a measure of this film’s self-worth.

On the day of Michael's release, four siblings brought new allegations of sexual abuse and grooming against Jackson. This is, in every sense of the word, a cursed project, a PR job that’ll seem even less forgivable in years to come. “It’s not that easy,” Michael says when his bodyguard advises breaking away from his father. “Life isn’t easy,” the man replies. Filmmaking isn’t easy either, but not being a callous opportunist shouldn’t be so hard.