Before
getting into the review – in other Pride news, Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness came out as non-binary (he/him.) Love! Happy Pride Month to him!
I’ve been
excited about Rocketman for a while,
and while I don’t think it quite lives up to all its promise, there’s a lot to
enjoy about this movie. Despite telling
a fairly by-the-numbers musician biopic story,
the way the film chooses to tell it is really engaging and entertaining.
Rocketman looks at Elton John’s formative years
as a pop/rock icon, dipping into his childhood before getting into his
struggling-artist period, his meteoric rise to stardom, his descent into
excesses, and his efforts to pull himself and his career back from the
brink. Along the way, he eternally
pushes the boundaries of onstage spectacle and searches for love that won’t
leave him.
Every
biopic about a famous musician essentially follows this template. Obscurity, then fame, then flameout, with an
option to end either triumphantly (with them turning their life around) or
tragically (with their untimely death.)
Strictly in terms of the story, Rocketman
does a fine enough job with this. I
really enjoy the theme of Elton’s need for love and affection amidst the glamor
of international stardom – a well-worn motif for this kind of story, but the
movie does it well. However, it
struggles to find solid narrative flow.
In particular, the second half at times devolves into a series of what
feel like rock bottoms, a perennial cycle of personal/professional disasters
and shouting matches that take the film in a lateral direction rather than
giving us any real forward momentum.
That’s my biggest disappointment with the movie: the plot that, at times, gives us a lot of
things happening but still feels like
it’s spinning its wheels.
It’s
something that I wish the movie had a better handle on, because otherwise, it’s
firing on all cylinders. I especially
love the inventive flourishes in the set-up of the story and the specific,
fantastical way the musical numbers are incorporated into the narrative. The trailers billed the film as “based on a
true fantasy,” and that, more than anything, is what sold me on it. While I assume it plays as fast and loose with
historical fact as many biopics do, it doesn’t present itself as a clearcut story that gives us the facts. Instead, it offers us the idea and feel of
the life of Elton John, told as a musical extravaganza that uses frenetic
performance pieces and glittery symbolism to show us what it was like to be
inside that whirlwind as it was happening.
(I, Tonya is another film that
undermines its own reliability re: the facts, albeit in a different way, and I
appreciate both it and Rocketman for
that.)
And so,
young Elton (then Reggie) conducts an imaginary orchestra from his bed by
flashlight. When Elton has his
breakthrough first performance at the Troubadour in LA, he and the audience
lift up off the ground in a moment of temporary weightlessness. Some numbers are constructed like music
videos, others like musical theater, representative of the ideas they’re trying
to get across or giving us a montage in real time as the ensemble swirls around
Elton to facilitate onscreen quick-changes, stand in as paparazzi, or proffer
literal silver platters of coke. The
other films that come to mind when I think of Rocketman are Moulin Rouge,
Velvet Goldmine, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch, none of which
tell their stories by a straightforward means of just showing us what the
characters do and say. We’re off on an
adventure of the imagination, which makes for a really neat viewing experience.
Strong
acting all around. I loved Taran Egerton
in the Kingsman movies, and he’s
terrific here as Elton: shy but
flamboyant, demanding but vulnerable, brilliant but self-destructive. Also great is Jamie Bell as his longtime
lyrics collaborator Bernie Taupin. In
some ways, their friendship is the main romance of the film, even if it’s a
platonic one; the scene showing the inception of “Your Song,” drawing deeply on
their relationship, is just gorgeous.
The film also features the likes of Richard Madden (a.k.a. Robb Stark,)
Bryce Dallas Howard as Elton’s mother, and Gemma Jones (who I always remember
as a great Mrs. Dashwood in the Emma Thompson/Hugh Grant Sense and Sensibility.)
Warnings
Sexual
content, drinking/smoking/drug use, language, brief violence, and strong
thematic elements (including self-harm.)
No comments:
Post a Comment