Rocketman pulses with the energy of a lot of good people trying to do their best: Taron Egerton singing like a champ, Richard Madden, who Vanity Fair suggests might be the most successful GoT actor to make the transition to the silver screen, being vile and charming, Bryce Dallas Howard, who is NOT Jessica Chastain, toggling between lovable and intolerable, and the mouthy and possibly brilliant producer/director Matthew Vaughn of Kingsmen, Man of Steel, and the Days of Futures Past X-Men reboot.
Right now, it’s nearly midnight and I’m writing this while looking down on the building that used to be my very favorite bookstore to visit across the street from my house, an old Borders and Books that went out of business probably more than ten years ago when I’d moved out and gone to college. Dad and I used to give ourselves forty minutes or more to walk down the street to the movies so that we could spend extra time browsing the stacks for new things to read. That place and that ritual were so special to me, the act of returning to a book I’d read before or planning the books I would read later. There were so many friends I met up with at that store, a lot of times that I got picked up there by my parents before we even lived nearby. I love being home and having time to spend doing small things with my family, my parents especially. Walking to the beach. Buying honeycrisps at the grocery store. Walking the dogs. Watching a movie for the first time together.
Walking out of the theater with my dad after seeing this movie, my first feelings were that it is hard to write true to life biopics about people who are still alive. Life is messy and without the neat marker of birth and dead, the totality of one’s choices, the trajectory their life seems uncertain and opaque.
Wife and Friend saw this the other day even though we’re apart, and both said that the winter sequence lasts the whole movie, which I think is another way of saying that Rocketman is a bittersweet portrayal of a complicated artist and a nuanced look at the people who shaped both his anxieties and success. Lots of reviews have commented on the fact that the biopic surprises by crafting Elton John as a sort of anti-hero. Rocketman doesn’t shy away from the grit underneath the glamor, the weight of John’s addictions and his lack of support from his family and business associates, save for the lone angel, Bernie Taupin. Long winter sequences require bigger stakes, more growth, and more patience from the audience. If your audience is willing to wait it out with you, the film’s unwillingness to tint rosy can be rewarding. Though Wife said she could do without John hugging himself at the end and leaving it to us to understand the interchange without training wheels. I wasn’t really expecting the young actor to play so much of a role in the film, but he has quite a few songs, not all of which are terrible.
At the same time, Big Brother says in so many words that he had “big problems” with the storytelling of this film, which, without following up with him yet, I take to mean that he finds the retelling of Elton John’s life story from the awkward confines of an AA meeting enervating. It does make for an inconvenient set to return to whenever the story calls for a break or jump in time. But maybe he and his wife are more unnerved by the way in which the action is sometimes swept up in musical numbers from John’s own catalogue? It seems like this is a bit of novel way to weave his music into the story, but at times it does feel a little opaque, like we’re looking at a mask of emotion rather than being let in to how John or others really feel. There are a few numbers where John shares his lines with others that I find really fun and disorienting. My two favorite numbers are probably Egerton’s duets with Madden and Bell (who plays Bernie). To some extent, it feels like the songs’ payoff is great the more of a fan of John’s music you are, and damn it must have been hard to write a script around these musical numbers while having some storyline cohesion. Whether it’s the stale trope of the AA meeting speeches or the musical numbers that communicate nothing personal or specific while also trying hard to communicate a lot about internality, I think I get the general sense of the film’s clunkiness.
The producers did a canny job of protecting this film from criticism about straight actors playing gay roles by having John greenlight the depiction by Egerton. It’s too bad that subjects of biopics don’t get asked for their opinion on who should portray them more often, but John’s involvement in the production kept a lot of knots from tangling on something simple like that. From what it sounds like, the bromance between Egerton and John is as adorable as it sounds. The depiction of John’s parents is excellent. Their affection and goodwill is evident, if not consistent, and the misplacement of their love, not its absence altogether, is its most lethal quality.
Take this recommendation from a person who never bothered to see the assumed trainwreck that was Bryan Singer’s Bohemian Rhapsody with a grain of salt, but Rocketman is a thoughtful portrayal of a work in progress that leans on some tropes and would not have been so warmly received had it not been given Glinda’s mark by the man it seeks to explain.
1 Comment