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Thursday, June 6, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS
Rocketman
Paramount Pictures
Ann Arbor 20 +
IMAX, GT6 Quality
16, the State Theatre
Taron Egerton (“Kingsman: The
Golden Circle”) doesn’t consider
“Rocketman” a biopic. While the
story revolves around the life and
music of Elton John, Egerton himself
filling John’s (platform) shoes, he has
a point: “Rocketman,” with its all-out
musical numbers and its elegant bal-
ance of fantasy with realism, isn’t like
the other biopics.
At the same time, it seems impos-
sible to discuss “Rocketman” without
invoking another biopic in particu-
lar. Yes, you (probably) guessed it:
“Bohemian Rhapsody.” Its subjects,
Queen and their legendary frontman
Freddie Mercury, have hardly left
the musician-biopic limelight since
the film’s Nov. 2018 release, though
they’ll soon be forced to share the
space with an increasing number of
artists. To that end, we have films
highlighting the lives and/or music
of Boy George, Aretha Franklin, Judy
Garland and Céline Dion lined up in
the near future. In spite of the critical
and popular success of “Bohemian,”
however, I would urge the filmmakers
in charge of telling these beloved art-
ists’ stories to look instead to “Rocket-
man,” if they’re interested in pulling
off more than their artist’s highlight
reel.
Where “Bohemian” had trouble
deciding if Freddie Mercury or
Queen’s songs were the point of the
film, “Rocketman” never took the
man behind the music or his story for
granted. Where “Bohemian” reduced
Mercury’s queer identity to a plot
point, “Rocketman” treated John’s
homosexuality like it was, oh, I don’t
know, part of his being a person. In
short, Dexter Fletcher (“Eddie the
Eagle”), who took over direction of
“Bohemian Rhapsody” after Bryan
Singer was accused of sexual assault
and was on board for all of “Rocket-
man,” seems to have learned from the
former’s errors.
But make no mistake: “Rocket-
man” is not “Bohemian” 2.0. Return-
ing to Egerton’s sentiment, the film
should not be defined strictly in the
ways it holds up against other biopics.
Its innovative employment of musi-
cal and fantasy genre techniques and
its confident foregrounding of queer
sexuality are due singular praise.
The musical lended them inge-
nious transition scenes, hinging on
overlapping lyrics, and at best com-
mendable, at worst forgivable flashes
forward in the film’s timeline. It’s
extraordinary how much time they
covered without oversimplifying any
events in John’s life (the most notable
exception being his marriage former
wife Renate Blauel, but I’m not going
to gripe about a film that respected a
queer character refusing to dwell on
his brief collapse under the weight of
heteronormative pressure).
It is also extraordinary what the
fantastical elements managed to rep-
resent. Each song is magically trans-
ported into the era of its making.
Gravity is suspended during John’s
first performance at The Troubadour,
as John levitates above the piano
bench and the enthused crowd rises
along with him. Never have I seen
those imprecise feelings — the ill-ease
that comes with revisiting our bygone
work, the floating sensation you expe-
rience when a musician just moves
you — so precisely captured on screen.
What excels the most about “Rock-
etman,” however, is not its visual
splendor or “La La Land”-caliber
song-and-dance. It’s that the movie
treats each of its characters fairly.
How many films could say the same?
Villains and heroes are formulaic for
a reason. For a completely different
reason — above all, its abiding belief in
the goodness and subsequent redeem-
ability of all people — “Rocketman”
pays no heed to these formulae and
dares to criticize its protagonist while
being sympathetic about why we end
up hurting the people we’re supposed
to love. We see this in another of the
film’s innovations: Remaking solos
into duets, trios and the like. Picture
this: John sings the opening lyrics to
“I Want Love,” when suddenly, the
people he’s singing about claim some
of the lines. His flawed mother (Bryce
Dallas Howard, “Jurassic World”),
his cold father (Steven Mackintosh,
“Urban Hymn”), his steadfast grand-
mother (Gemma Jones “God’s Own
Country”). These thoughtful recre-
ations remind us that we sing along to
songs about real people.
How to tell a star’s story
JULIANNA MORANO
Summer Managing Arts Editor
FILM REVIEW
PARAMOUNT PICTURES
When I received Ocean Vuong’s
debut novel “On Earth We’re Brief-
ly Gorgeous” in the mail, I read the
jacket description to my mother
immediately. It began, “‘On Earth
We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ is a letter
from a son to a mother who cannot
read.” She stopped me there, ask-
ing if the book was a first edition,
and told me to keep it safe. Even
from that one sentence, not even
having read the book, my mother
knew that Vuong’s writing was
special. Having read it, I know
that is true, and
that his writing is
beyond special —
it is a distillation
of emotion that
only a poet could
achieve,
captur-
ing the intensity
of
familial
and
romantic love in
a way that’s near-
ly impossible to
explain. From the
first words of the
jacket to the last of
his acknowledge-
ments, Vuong has
created a world of his own within
the confines of a novel, pushing his
readers so deeply into the experi-
ence of his characters that it feels
like they’ve lived it themselves.
“On Earth We’re Briefly Gor-
geous” is a book about the immi-
grant experience, and it is also a
book about the queer experience.
It is a book about a son’s love for
his mother, for his grandmother,
for his family’s homeland and the
home they built away from it. In
another writer’s hands, this would
surely be too much to address in
one novel. But Vuong, in his first
foray into fiction, is more than
capable of handling all of these
things. In truth, the realities of
being human are not easily swal-
lowable, and certainly more com-
plicated than we wish they were.
Vuong knows this well and weaves
each aspect of his semi-autobio-
graphical story through the lens
of personhood, making the big
picture distinguishable among its
million puzzle pieces.
The book begins at the onset of
narrator Little Dog’s childhood,
as he collects scattered memo-
ries of his mother to share with
her. Vuong’s skill as a poet (hav-
ing won the T.S. Eliot Prize in
2017) is immediate in these first
pages. Through a mix of abstract
description and fleeting emotion,
he stabilizes memory despite its
ephemeral nature and invites the
reader in to remember with him,
his mother and his younger self.
“I am writing because they told
me to never start a sentence with
because,” Vuong writes, “But I
wasn’t trying to make a sentence
— I was trying to break free.”
“On Earth” is cen-
tered around the
confusion of this
search
for
free-
dom, revealing the
interplay between
the
“why”s
and
“because”s of a dif-
ficult life. He can’t
start
a
sentence
with
“because,”
but Vuong is a mas-
ter of explanation;
even if it isn’t in
the way a reader
expects.
Though
Little
Dog is not exactly Vuong, or vice
versa, the intimacy between the
author and character is palpable.
It’s almost like Vuong is trying to
describe how his reflection looks
in a foxed mirror; there are some
parts of Little Dog that are the
author completely, but the others
are somewhere in the middle of
them both.
It’s this foggy quality of mem-
ory that colors the entirety of “On
Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,”
almost like a character of its own.
Of course, it affects Little Dog’s
memories of his mother, but also
her own recollections of her life
and those of her mother, too. In a
narrative heavy with their family’s
story of immigration from Viet-
nam, this emphasis on memory is
also tied to Little Dog’s relation-
ship with a heritage fraught with
trauma.
‘On Earth’ tells a
tale of becoming
CLARA SCOTT
Senior Arts Editor
On Earth We’re
Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong
Jonathan Cape
June 4, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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