The media has done a good job of talking about what’s not in “Michael.” I refer, of course, to the accusations of child sexual abuse that dogged Michael Jackson from 1993 until the day he died (and, of course, they didn’t stop then). The media has done a far less good job of talking about what’s actually in “Michael.” If you scan the coverage, you’d think that the movie was the most scrubbed and innocuous of jukebox musicals. You might think the reason it’s going to make a jillion dollars is that a lot of people are only too happy to revel in a Michael Jackson biopic that’s all greatest-hits cues and nostalgic high points: a two-hour hologram of Michael mania.
If that’s all “Michael” was, it’s certainly possible that the film might still be breaking box-office records. Yet I think one reason for “Michael’s” extraordinary success is that it’s actually a more interesting movie than many have given it credit for. In its sanded-off middle-of-the-road biopic-of-a-supernova way, “Michael” hits an emotional chord that touches something resonant and moving about Michael Jackson and his music. The film tells a very particular story, and what that story is about is the very source of Michael Jackson’s creative power.
“Michael” shows us an ascent to the pop stratosphere on the wings of his genius. Through it all, though, he has a major antagonist: his father, Joe (played with a hustler’s threatening authenticity by Colman Domingo), who made the Jackson 5 what they were and thinks that he owns them. Even considering what a stern taskmaster he is, there’s no reason on earth for him to take off his belt and beat the young Michael with it; that’s a display of violence worthy of a criminal. And when Michael, having turned 20, joins forces with Quincy Jones to record “Off the Wall,” which will become his breakthrough 1979 solo record (though in fact it’s his fifth solo album), he’s asserting his independence in a way that will only escalate the war of wills between himself and Joe, the Svengali dictator who thinks of his son as an indentured contract player.
Throughout the movie, their relationship heads in one direction, and toward one thing: separation. And there’s plenty of Oedipal showbiz drama along the way, from the scene in the law office where Michael, imperious behind aviator shades, starts to feel the cold thrust of his own authority (that’s when he gets the idea to fire Joe as his manager) to the horrific aftermath of the accident that befell him during the shooting of a Pepsi commercial, a cataclysm the film presents — metaphorically — as an outgrowth of Joe’s karma, his need to destroy Michael, if necessary, in order to possess him.
But the underlying story that “Michael” tells, in tracing Michael’s war with his father, is the saga of Michael Jackson’s anger. That’s the quality Joe’s manipulation and abuse planted in Michael. And that’s the quality we begin to see simmering under the surface of Jaafar Jackson’s performance.
Here’s the power of it. Anger wasn’t just Michael’s (understandable) reaction to what a tyrannical cad his father was. More than that, anger became a foundation of Jackson’s creative mystique. Because when you listen to many of his key greatest songs, from “Billie Jean” to “Beat It” to “Bad” to his most unacknowledged masterpiece, “Smooth Criminal,” that’s what they’re expressing. That’s what set those songs apart. It was Michael Jackson’s anger that made them burn like a transcendent disco inferno.
By and large, none of that is true of “Off the Wall,” a great record that brought Michael to a new peak, yet not the peak of “Thriller.” The emotion that courses through “Off the Wall” is joy — the sheer exaltation of “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough,” in which he might be talking about “Star Wars” or the ecstasy of love (“Keep on…with the force, don’t stop,/Don’t stop…’til you get enough”), or the dancing-on-air romanticism of “Rock with You.” But three years later, when he released “Thriller,” Jackson made an album that stood in the same relation to “Off the Wall” as the Beatles’ albums after “Rubber Soul” stood in relation to the ones before. He’d scaled the stairway of his talent to become a more visionary artist. And the defining quality of his new music, and his new image, was its electrostatic fury. In the case of “Billie Jean,” the greatest pop song of the 1980s, you might even call it rage.
“Billie Jean” was, of course, an attack on the woman who would dare to falsely accuse Michael of being the father of her child. Yet part of what made it such an indelible song is that it was almost as if he was attacking sexuality itself (“Billie Jean is not my lover”). The anger was expressed not just in the lyrics but in the fearsome up/down domination of the beat, and in the sound of Michael’s voice — the pent-up intensity, the yelps and hiccups, the fusion of despair and vituperative passion into a phrasing so percussive it cut like a dagger (“Who will dance…on the floor…in the round”). The meaning of “Billie Jean” was also there in the molten glare he had in that video. We think of Michael Jackson as a “family-friendly” performer because that’s the image he crafted for himself, and he was indeed that thing, yet he also worked in the tradition of pop musicians who expressed a volcanic wrath that had no other outlet but song.
“Beat It” channeled an adjacent alchemy. It was a song that decried gang violence, yet the beauty of it was that Michael condemned that violence with a stoked vengeance as agitated as that of any gangbanger. What the singing and the choreography told you was, on some level, he yearned to be one. The same way that he longed to be a monster in “Thriller” or as bad as he could be in “Bad.” His offstage persona was that of a saint: the high voice, the decorous manners, the giggly gentleness. Yet it all acted as a set-up for the funk-soul demon he unleashed in his music.
This was brought to an apotheosis in “Smooth Criminal,” the song that was actually, in effect, the sequel to “Billie Jean.” It was built around a furious, combustible expansion of the earlier song’s beat, and told the story of a girl named Annie who was murdered. But though Michael practically wept tears for her in the chorus, the subtext was that Annie’s murder was the punishment for Billie Jean’s sin. And it was Michael, on some level, who was the smooth criminal.
There are key moments in “Michael” where we glimpse Michael’s anger. The film is shrewd in showing us that Bubbles the chimp — a joke to most of us for decades — was, in fact, a case of Michael bringing a wild animal into his home as an act of stand back aggression against his family. And at the end, when he finally summons the force to throw Joe over, it’s a moment so liberating that it’s a thriller. Mostly, though, the story “Michael” tells is that of how Michael’s anger is tamped down, redirected, channeled. All so that it can be the pulse of his art.
