Friday, June 14, 2019

Rocketman (2019, R)

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.)

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