Directed by Kenny Ortega
The question that is neither asked nor answered is this: If any of them had a son who was eight, would they conceivably permit that child to spend a millisecond alone with the King of Pop?
One prays not–but of course, many parents did acquiesce in MJ’s sleepovers with their male children, more than I suspect we will ever know. In the course of more than two decades during which he lay next to prepubescent boys at night–“sharing a bed,” he once said, is “the most loving thing you can do with someone”–two families were subsequently involved in legal action against MJ, one in a civil case leading to a cash settlement reportedly in excess of $20 million and the other in a criminal trial that ended in his acquittal by a jury of Californians who were, one hopes, not his peers.
His untimely demise at the age of 50 led to the only possible resuscitation of his career, a posthumous one. A still-living Michael Jackson could never have emerged from the shadows cast by his behavior, consistent in every particular with every pedophile’s solipsistic conviction that his imperishable hunger to vampirize the innocence of children is nothing less than the highest form of love.
Add to that the bizarre efforts to amend and alter his own appearance, which had turned him into a kind of sideshow attraction of a human being, and you have a man for whom the fatal ingestion of a coma-inducing sleeping draught was the first smart career move in the quarter-century since he established a new standard for worldwide stardom with the release of Thriller.
This Is It, an assemblage of footage from rehearsals for concerts Jackson was to perform in London this fall, is part of that posthumous resuscitation. It’s not a movie, it’s not a concert, it’s not a documentary, it’s not really much of anything except an intermittently interesting portrait of how an overproduced pop event is created.
The movie posits the notion that these concerts were going to smash all records, put him back on top, show people things they had never seen before. But it wouldn’t have. There’s no there there. The MJ we see in nearly every frame of This Is It has no presence. He floats, wraith-like, through the film, and the director, Kenny Ortega, attempts to make him seem more substantial by offering subtitles of nearly every sentence MJ speaks.
In one sense, this is disturbing, because the subtitles have an almost deifying effect, the way Christ’s words are printed in red in some versions of the New Testament. In another sense, by using this technique, Ortega is underlining just how spectral a creature Jackson had become.
He is a sickly looking 50-year-old man doing a wan imitation of his 25-year-old self–indeed, the man we are seeing could just as easily be a Michael Jackson imitator. What was once exciting to watch had long since curdled into embarrassing mannerism. The astonishing kid who seemed to be able to do anything with his body and voice proved, in the end, to be extremely limited.
He had maybe five dance moves he would simply go through over and over in different order–the crotch grab, the leg kick, the upper-body robot, the walking backwards forwards, and the circular slide–as he punctuated his tremulous falsetto with endlessly repetitive “hoos” and “hee hees” and “jamones.” It’s tedious to watch him dance, and tedious to listen to him sing.
The movie asks us to grade on a curve. We are supposed to be surprised and delighted to discover that Michael Jackson could still move at all, and that he could still hit a note. But he moves without spark, and he sings without conviction. It’s not that he was just going through the moves; clearly, this series of concerts was very important to him. He’s working hard, trying hard. But the Michael Jackson we see here, the Michael Jackson who died as the footage that became This Is It was being filmed, was already gone.
There was no soul left in that surgically mutilated body. MJ had long ago surrendered it.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
