Can a Billion Dollars Be Wrong?
Michael finally comes home next Monday, August 10, when Antoine Fuqua's Michael Jackson biopic starts streaming on Starz, with a TV premiere the same night at 7 p.m. ET/PT. It arrives wearing numbers no biopic has ever worn: $1.016 billion worldwide, and a run that took the biggest opening day ever for a biographical film off Oppenheimer on its way to becoming the biggest biopic ever made. It also arrives wearing a 38 percent critics' score and a 39 on Metacritic, while the people who actually bought tickets handed it an A minus CinemaScore. That is not a disagreement. That is two groups describing two different films. And next Monday, everyone who skipped the theater finally gets to decide which one they watched.
Start with the movie audiences saw. Jaafar Jackson, Michael's own nephew, does not impersonate his uncle so much as channel him: the voice, the glide, the stillness right before the move. Fuqua shoots the musical recreations like they are the point, because they are, running from the Jackson 5's living-room rehearsals all the way to the Bad World Tour at Wembley. Colman Domingo gives Joseph Jackson real menace, Miles Teller hovers usefully as Jackson's attorney, and the songs do what the songs have always done. On its first weekend it took Straight Outta Compton's record for a musical biopic opening, and the audience grades never budged. As a jukebox spectacle, a two-hour argument that nobody ever moved like this man, it flat-out delivers.
Then there is the movie critics reviewed. The script ends in 1988, as the Bad tour begins, which means the abuse allegations that shadowed Jackson's final two decades simply never happen. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw called it "a kind of cruise-ship entertainment, which can't quite bring itself to show that Michael was an abuse victim." IndieWire's Kate Erbland wrote that by omitting the allegations "the final film has been mostly stripped of any humanity." They are not wrong either. A biography that rules its subject's hardest chapters out of frame is not really a biography; it is an authorized concert film with a childhood attached. Both verdicts are accurate. The audience graded the show. The critics graded the history.
So which movie will you meet when you press play next Monday? Honestly: the audience's one. On a couch with the sound up, Michael works the way Bohemian Rhapsody worked, as a greatest-hits machine with a lead performance strong enough to carry the gaps. Go in knowing what it will not tell you and it earns its two hours. Go in expecting Rocketman's bruised honesty or the fever of Elvis and you will feel the flinch every time the film changes the subject. Press play for the performance. Read the history somewhere else.
