Overstuffed effort … but worthwhile viewing
There are any number of Elton John lyrics that would fit nicely here, to start this review of Rocketman. You’re thinking of them now. You know you are. There are so many. How do you choose? You’re also picturing the former Reginald Dwight, festooned in iridescence and bedecked in enough feathers to set off hundreds of allergic reactions, enough sequins to blind at 100 yards. And now that you’re thinking about Elton, you’re tripping back over the bio and musical highlights: Big ’70s rock star, years of excess, late ’80s resurgence, recent marriage and fatherhood, late-career comparisons to Tom Jones or maybe Van Morrison.
Great, you think, but how, you ask, does all that get stuffed into a two-hour long mainstream movie? Great question!
Rocketman (now open widely) attempts only somewhat successfully to answer your (now) burning question. It will irritate as much as entertain, confound as much as confirm. But it will be worth your time.
Falling squarely in the overlap between rock fable, biopic, and musical, the film establishes some very high ambitions, but fails to completely deliver on any one. Yet the attempts are admirable, and like The Piano Man’s jumpsuit sequins catching your eye in a 1975 Dodger stadium concert, they’re memorable.
Inevitable comparisons will arise between Rocketman and last year’s surprising ultra-hit Bohemian Rhapsody. The Queen film succeeds by sticking to a straight biography narrative, and digging deep into the songs. Rocketman gets lost, and misses opportunities by trying to splice bits of Elton’s hits into musical numbers depicting key life events.
John’s life and career are well-known. Reginald Dwight endures a distant father and a disgruntled mother, and is shepherded by his maternal grandmother. Playing piano in London pubs and with traveling bands leads to a chance meeting with Bernie Taupin, and born is one of the most historic music and lyrics teams to ever grace the world. Success, stardom, and excess inevitably follow, until bodily systems are purged, sexual orientations proclaimed, and sanities resumed in the early ’90s. Present day Sir Elton enjoys continued musical, familial, and philanthropic success.
The film basically tracks this arc, beginning with boy Elton’s suburban London council flat hosting a tragically miscast Bryce Dallas Howard as little Reggie’s mother. Howard struggles with her English accent, and gamely attempts to breathe some life into Lee Hall’s script. She keeps the entire family at an emotional arm’s length, and battles to win the embittered spouse long-game with Reggie’s father, played unremarkably by Steven Mackintosh. Here the film announces its ambition with a scene where feelings of frustration are handed off in song between all family members. The attempt lands with a thud. It’s forced, abrupt, and self-conscious.
Played by Matthew Illesley, young Reggie establishes equal parts ongoing unhappiness and burgeoning talent. His emotional and aspirational tank at FULL, the adolescent Reggie (Kit Conner) strikes out into London’s pubs, and quickly finds that Saturday nights are all right for fighting, as well as for shedding classical music in favor of honky tonk.
Taron Egerton, now with the character reigns, baselines proto-Elton Reggie as a talented, but dangerously immature and unable to accept, let alone announce, his homosexuality.
Rocketman, unlike Bohemian Rhapsody, is not interested in concocting origin myths of Elton John’s super hero-sized hits. Instead it’s chosen to underlie and heighten key biographical moments with song sections, sometimes just simple chord progressions. This daring gambit is meant to show us John’s life through the artistic core of his songs, delivered not through the genre of biopic, but rather through the genre of the musical. The effect is uneven. The legendary six-night sold-out 1970 Troubadour run in L.A. is rendered with a delightful bit of magic realism. But the title song “Rocketman” is pressed into service as a metaphor for John’s alcohol and drug abuse, an effect so jarring that we’re pulled out of the film when we realize this was not what Taupin had in mind when he wrote the song.
And what about those songs? Queen was mostly a hard-rockin’ band, and their film gave us a glimpse into Freddie Mercury’s creative inspirations, and showed us a band with an effective, though evolving, creative process. Elton John and Bernie Taupin have enjoyed a fifty-year relationship and collaboration, the fruit of which we all know and love. Rocketman misses a golden opportunity to delve into just how John took Taupin’s lyrics and married them with chords and his utterly genius phrasing. And “Bennie and the Jets”? How do such simple music and such complex lyrics work so well? Even a glimpse would have sufficed. Sadly, Rocketman misses a chance to help answer.
Egerton doesn’t bring much subtlety to his Elton. We see social discomfort, public triumph, and personal pain in a carousel of scenes, the emotional core of which grows redundant and tiresome. Eventually, John does overcome his demons, both literally and figuratively, reconciles at least with his mom, comes out, and has a late ’80s resurgence. The film ends with an extended epilogue, the thrust of which is that all is well, and everyone is happy. The effect is, as with John’s more recent catalog, overly sentimental and self-satisfying.
Hidden gems do shine through in the film. Tate Donovan’s Doug Weston is clearly having way more fun than anyone else, and delivers his lines at a level just above perma-smirk. Richard Madden plays John Reid, an early lover and longtime Elton John manager, with dazzling restraint and control, and give us one of the film’s few characters with a depth that’s reinforced physically and through dialog.
Don’t see Rocketman to learn more about those great songs, or about their musical or lyrical origins. See it and judge it based on whether rock fable, musical, and biopic — all expansive and demanding genres on their own — can coexist, collaborate, and make filmic music together.
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Rocketman opens today in Bay Area theaters.
