Get on Up (2014)
(In French, On TV, May 2020) There are a few problems with the idea of a James Brown theatrical biography, most of them revolving around who’s ever going to even try playing Brown; and second, how can you even try to fit Brown’s eventful, occasionally scabrous life in a film fit to show in cineplexes? Get on Up at least gets the first part right: a pre-stardom Chadwick Boseman makes for a mesmerizing Brown, nailing the physical portion of his persona and letting Brown’s vocals do their job during performances. The rest of the film… suffers from the predictable issues. Brown’s life and career were long enough that trying to do them justice would take us on a whirlwind tour of profound social change in addition to his own actions along the way—a tall order for something that’s not a miniseries. But 139 minutes is all the film will allow itself, and the squeeze required to fit everything in that time is prodigious. Hailing from backwoods rural America, Brown’s rise to notoriety is nothing short of miraculous, but Get on Up does manage to point out that the very same excess of self-confidence that led to his fame also led to considerable problems later in life in his relationships with women, bandmates, employees and the law itself. What’s not so successful is the scattershot, nonlinear approach to the events of Brown’s life that the script follows and director Tate Taylor tries to execute—it’s often difficult to know where Brown is emotionally because the film can’t always lay the required groundwork in a sequence. Considering this, the back-and-forth approach may mask the conventional aspect of this music biopic, but doesn’t bring any new or worthwhile effect to the film. Another device that doesn’t work as intended is Boseman-as-Brown occasionally addressing the camera—it should give us an idea of what’s inside his head but, in the end, doesn’t give us much more than if those moments had been skipped. It’s those flaws that make Get on Up an interesting, but not quite successful biopic—sure, you get the basics, but not necessarily a well-rounded portrait of a man that was, by all accounts, far more complicated than here. At least it does have the music—anyone could do much worse than listening to even a standard biopic filled with Brown’s greatest hits.
