‘Michael’
Directed by Antoine Fuqua (PG-13)
★
“Michael is like if you made a cheery biopic of Bill Cosby that ended with his successful run on The Cosby Show,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. “A deliberate act of whitewashing,” the long-awaited new Michael Jackson biopic presents the crowd-pleasing half of a “sordid” true tale, cutting short its account just before it would have become necessary to revisit the multiple allegations of child sexual abuse that surfaced in 1993 and have continued to shadow the pop star’s legacy since his 2009 death. “The fact that Michael concludes with a title card announcing ‘His Story Continues’ doesn’t suffice as an explanation.”
If you focus only on what this “lavishly conventional” biopic leaves out, however, “you may miss the compelling urgency of what it gets in,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. The movie opens in 1966, when Michael was roughly 8 and his tyrannical father Joe, played by Colman Domingo, is beating and berating his five young sons to push them to stardom. We then leap to 1978 to witness a young adult Michael, played by real-life nephew Jaafar Jackson, engineering his escape into a solo career, with Quincy Jones guiding him. The younger Jackson isn’t as photogenic as his indelible uncle, “but does he ever nail the look, the voice, the electrostatic moves—and, more than that, the mixture of delicacy and steel that made Michael who he was.” The picture’s downfall is its lack of real interest in Michael as a human being, said Robert Daniels in RogerEbert.com. Produced by its subject’s estate and four of his siblings, “it has nothing original to say about him,” merely resketching his life to age 30 as most of us know it, failing even to provide insight into his emotional pain. Barely a movie, Michael is “a filmed playlist in search of a story.”
‘Mother’
Directed by David Lowery (R)
★★
“The more movies you’ve seen, the less patience you might have with movies that try to impress you with how wiggy they are,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. When the new film featuring Anne Hathaway as an icy fictional pop icon isn’t teasing us with glimpses of ghosts or bloodlettings, it’s “just a slog,” despite a premise and a pairing of two stars that suggest it could have been more. At times, Mother Mary is “a phantasmagoric fever dream of a gothic pop opera,” said Katie Walsh in the Chicago Tribune. At others, it’s “a single-setting two-hander that pits two of our most mesmerizing actresses against each other.”
Hathaway, playing the titular singer on the eve of a highly anticipated comeback, journeys to the atelier of a former close collaborator portrayed by Michaela Coel. Hathaway’s fraying idol wants a dress of nearly magical power as she returns to the stage, and Coel’s Sam agrees to make it, airing grievances as she does about how Mary treated her. The movie “certainly casts a spell,” but the story itself “devolves into mush.” To enjoy the film, “a certain leap of faith is required,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. When, at last, it “rushes headfirst into delirium,” viewers ready to roll with it may find that it “taps into the same transcendent state that great pop music does,” getting into your head and under your skin “in ways that defy description.
Michael Jackson’s life story, willfully truncated, and a pop star and her jilted collaborator reconnect
