His life is strictly lite FM.
Picture what Mamma Mia might have been like if Amanda Seyfried had spent the movie guzzling Smirnoff for breakfast, doing Himalayas of blow, and generally being tragic, and you’ll have some inkling of what you’re in for with Rocketman, the strange Elton John jukebox musical.
I’m struggling to imagine the pitch meeting for this movie.
“Elton John: The Musical. Do you love it?”
“So, was there an incredibly arduous road to success?”
“Not really. Middle-class. Dad was a bit chilly. Mum was a bit dismissive.”
“Also known as, ‘being English’?”
“He started playing professionally really young.”
“Don’t they all?”
“As soon as he hit it big, he hit . . . the bottle.”
“And?”
“He did a lot of coke.”
“In the Seventies my aunt Bertha did cocaine.”
“He was secretly gay.”
“Secretly? Didn’t he dress like Marie Antoinette of Vegas?”
“His career would have been destroyed if word got out.”
“Wasn’t David Bowie telling everyone he was bisexual then?”
“Okay, okay. The story is pedestrian. But we’re going to cloak it in a series of bizarre high-concept music videos/suicide attempts. You’re going to love the one the number he does at the bottom of his swimming pool.”
“You realize this is Paramount Pictures you’re talking to.”
“I know! You guys finish last every year! That’s why we thought of you!”
Unlike Bohemian Rhapsody, a dutiful biopic with music that was free of dancing, Rocketman is a musical that uses its tunes as fancies to illustrate John’s various triumphs and tribulations, complete with Broadway chorus boys whirling in the background. A problem with this approach is that the lyrics, which John did not write, don’t much fit his life story. So “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” gets shoehorned in as a description of what it’s like playing in quarrelsome pubs. This is the kind of contrivance that kept happening in Rock of Ages, the disastrous 2012 jukebox musical about 1980s rock.
Also unlike Bohemian Rhapsody, Rocketman ditches the classic original recordings in favor of inferior recreations. Taron Egerton does a decent job as Elton John, but for a guy who shows up for work dressed as a glitter-jumpsuit batboy or a disco gladiator chicken, he’s awfully glum. He enters the movie dressed as Satan from the South Park movie, then sits down for some anger, confession, and healing with a twelve-step group whose sessions create a boo-hoo framing device around the movie. Egerton does set a record unlikely ever to be equalled by performing “I’m Still Standing” for a second time on the big screen; the last time he did it as a gorilla called Johnny in the animated Sing, and that scene was far better than anything in this movie.
Such is the emphasis on making a Moulin Rouge–style fantasia of everything that even when we see Elton performing, the song he would have been doing at the time is not the one presented; the smashing success of his American debut at the L.A. club the Troubadour in 1970 is suggested via a hypercharged “Crocodile Rock,” a song not written until two years later. (In reality, John did mostly ballads at that show.) A climactic rendition of the movie’s title song is a clunky mix of the literal and metaphoric; the woozy alienation of the lyrics provide a not-bad match for John’s forlorn, self-hating mood at the time, but then director Dexter Fletcher ruins it by having John literally blast off into space above Dodger Stadium. The the last time I saw something this cheesy in a musical it must have been Xanadu.
Credit must be given to Fletcher (who stepped in to finish Bohemian Rhapsody when its original director Bryan Singer was fired) for bringing in a lot of ideas. Unfortunately, just about none of them are good ones. John levitates playing “Crocodile Rock,” and Fletcher has the audience levitate right along with him. It’s not a bad approach to depict the ecstatic bond between audience and performer, and Martin Scorsese might have made a sublime moment out of it. But it’s empty flash that doesn’t lead anywhere, just as the many scenes of John’s decadent L.A. existence with his abusive Scottish boyfriend-manager (Richard Madden) don’t deliver any insight on the perils of outlandish wealth, the textures of the Boogie Nights era, the dawning of gay liberation or . . . anything at all.
We’re left, solely, with the theme that Elton John was a saddo until he quit drinking and drugs and that his exuberant stage persona was a mere put-on. Since John recovered and is still with us, though, the movie isn’t a tragedy, merely a downer. Freddie Mercury may have led an operatic life — crowned by an operatic song — but Elton John’s life is strictly lite FM.