Michael Jackson's ultimate bleaching

BarcelonaTo understand what kind of film Michael is, the biopic about Michael Jackson that has just been released, one only needs to look at the credits, where John Branca and John McClain appear as main producers, the lawyers appointed as executors of Michael Jackson's post-mortem business and who have turned him into the most profitable dead celebrity in the world, with more than 3.5 billion euros generated since Jackson's death in 2009, according to Forbes. Like so many other biopics, Michael exists above all as a commercial strategy that must protect and reinforce a brand. Therefore, the margin of artistic freedom that director Antoine Fuqua (Training day, Brooklyn's Finest) or screenwriter John Logan (Gladiator, Skyfall) have had is perceived as very scarce.

But Michael is also a family affair, as the credits again show, with one of his sons – Prince Michael Jackson – and five of the singer's siblings as executive producers: Latoya and the other Jackson 5 members, Marlon, Jackie, Jermaine, and Tito, who died in 2024. We also find Jermaine's son, Jaafar Jackson, who debuts in cinema as the protagonist of his uncle's biopic and offers an absolutely mimetic performance that reproduces with unsettling perfection the musician's voice, mannerisms, and choreography. And, of course, the events recounted in the film are not far from those set in 1990 by the autobiography of the clan's matriarch, Katherine Jackson, which already inspired the 1992 biographical miniseries The Jacksons: An American Dream.Like that Emmy-winning series, Michael covers only the first two acts of the singer's career: childhood marked by his father's demanding nature and beatings –played by Colman Domingo as a petty, unfeeling monster– which leads to early success and the inability to be a normal child, and as an adult, the conquest of solo stardom as a vehicle for definitive emancipation from paternal labor and emotional yoke. The story stops after the planetary success of Thriller and the farewell tour of the Jackson 5, with a musical epilogue from the Bad era (1987), but at the end a title card assures that Jackson's story – and presumably, the more extravagant and controversial parts of his biography– will continue in a later film.

Superficial and Wikipedia-like

This episodic quality accentuates the feeling of a superhero origin story, with the corresponding manifest destiny –“there is no one like you,” everyone repeats to him, from his mother to Berry Gordy– and a great enemy to defeat: the father. The psychological portrait is superficial –being generous–, the dialogues too explanatory, and Jackson's adult behavior is presented in an understanding and favorable light, as if adopting wild animals, preferring to relate to children, or undergoing cosmetic surgery at 17 were minor eccentricities and not extreme compensatory mechanisms for a traumatic childhood. All of this has the dramatic depth of a Wikipedia page and denotes a worrying lack of interest in the creative processes (Quincy Jones has an anecdotal and passive role) or in Jackson's musical context and influences, beyond a television cameo by James Brown and mentions of Marcel Marceau and the recurring textual motif of Peter Pan.

The impression that Michael

conveys is that of a calculated image makeover, a conscious exercise in whitewashing all the singer's rough edges that lays the groundwork for rewriting in a future film the last act of Jackson's life, that of the accusations of child sexual abuse, the addiction to painkillers, the suspicious marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, and the children conceived through surrogacy. The film only makes artistic sense when the music and dance take center stage and Jaafar Jackson asserts himself as the world's best Michael Jackson impersonator. In this regard, Michael functions almost as a musical or, rather, as a two-hour music video with unnecessary dramatic interludes, except for a fun cameo by Mike Myers as the head of CBS. In the cast, it is also surprising to find a star like Miles Teller playing a supporting role as a lawyer, but it all adds up when you know that his character is John Branca, the film's producer and current financial manager of Jackson's legacy.