The new bio-pic of Elton John, “Rocketman,” is directed by Dexter Fletcher. Last year, he assumed command of the Freddie Mercury film, “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and steered it to a safe harbor, after the previous director walked the plank. If you need somebody to recount the rise of a British rock god from pallid suburbia to the baroque extremes of fame, and to create a stir without causing too much of a fuss, Fletcher is your man. He is the helmsman of the acceptably outrageous. David Bowie fans, watch out.
“Rocketman” is framed as a therapeutic exercise. We first encounter the adult Elton John (Taron Egerton) as he stomps down a corridor in a tangerine catsuit, tricked out with wings and horns. He looks like Hellboy, only shorter and angrier. Bursting through a door, Elton finds himself in group therapy, and immediately reveals his addictions: sex, drink, and drugs—the usual suspects—plus bags and bags of shopping. “I was actually a very happy child,” he adds, and, with that, we are spirited back to his youth, and thence through his personal past. We get the early gigs in pubs; the meeting with his lifelong lyricist, Bernie Taupin (Jamie Bell); the doomy arrival of John Reid (Richard Madden), who became Elton’s lover and manager; the globe-straddling glory; and the statutory crackup, without which no rock fable is complete. The whole thing winds up where it began, with the star, efficiently cured of his miseries, embracing his younger self, and carolling “I’m Still Standing.” Job done.
There is a famous boyhood photograph of Elton—or, as he then was, Reggie Dwight—seated at the piano, his hands on the keys, turning to the camera with a smile. His hair is neatly brushed, as befits a polite scion of Pinner, an uneventful town northwest of London. The youngest actor who plays him in “Rocketman,” Matthew Illesley, is a perfect match for that photo, and, when he’s required to belt out “The Bitch Is Back” in a ringing treble, outside the Dwight family home, with local residents pitching in, Illesley gives it everything. He thereby sets a pattern for the movie, in which the songs are delivered not by Elton John but by the actors, with varying degrees of success. Reggie, his mother (Bryce Dallas Howard), his grandmother (Gemma Jones), and even his father (Steven Mackintosh), as stiff as a brush, all contribute to “I Want Love,” for instance, as they wander around the house.
Compare this scene with the music video of the same song, from 2001, when it was lip-synched by Robert Downey, Jr., as he wandered around a house. It was eerie to hear the familiar tones of Elton John—the long and winding vowels, the dying falls, the salty Englishness pepped up with a transatlantic twang—emerge from someone else’s mouth, and there are times, during “Rocketman,” when you yearn for a snatch of that unmistakable sound. Egerton is busy and fizzy in the leading role, but there’s a curious blankness in his impersonation, and a shortage of charm. Hard to tell whether viewers will flock to him as they did to Rami Malek, who gave such electric life to “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Yet “Rocketman” is the better film. Not by much, but just enough. Fletcher and his screenwriter, Lee Hall (who joined forces with Elton John on “Billy Elliot the Musical”), allow themselves all sorts of latitude. Elton’s bad behavior, for one thing, gets a proper airing; we see him falling into bed with Reid, quenching his thirsty soul with vodka, and surfing atop a mob of orgiasts. (Mind you, as even Stanley Kubrick proved with “Eyes Wide Shut,” in 1999, orgies may be fun to try but they’re grindingly boring to behold.) Then, there are factual tweaks. In 1970, for example, when the singer took his first trip to Los Angeles, he did indeed raise the roof at the Troubadour, as the movie suggests—but not with the song we hear, “Crocodile Rock,” for the simple reason that it was not written until 1972.
From that white lie, though, comes the highlight of the film. As the song hits its stride, Elton dispenses with his piano stool and—keeping his hands on the keys, like little Reggie—lofts his legs into the air. And there he stays. So hot is the thrill that the action freezes. And such is the uplift that the revellers at the Troubadour, too, begin to levitate; we watch their feet leave the ground. The joint is jumpin’, and that jump, as every pop star knows, and as all fans feel in their bones, matters more than the life, however staid or fraught, from which the music sprang. Forget therapy. Screw gravity. For a few minutes, exultant and exalted, “Rocketman” takes off.
In many respects, Godzilla is hard to distinguish from Elton John. Terrible temper? Check. Professional longevity? Check. Tireless vocal vigor? Check. They even share a fondness for baseball parks as suitable arenas for their skills; “Rocketman” re-creates Elton’s triumphant appearance at Dodger Stadium, in 1975, while “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” a new addition to the franchise, shows the title character slugging a rival predator at Fenway Park. For years, it’s true, the singer has beaten the beast in the costume stakes, since Godzilla prefers to function au naturel, with his dark-green skin, all wrinkled and ridged, lending him the look of a furious avocado. For the latest film, however, he grows more fashion-conscious, arranging for his dorsal plates to flash bright blue whenever he’s totally stoked. Once Elton John sees this movie, he will have to get himself a set of those.
The film is a sequel to “Godzilla” (2014), and we start with a reminder of the chaos that was wrought therein—“a historic tragedy that changed the world forever as we know it.” I’m embarrassed to admit that I’d forgotten all about it. Odd how often that happens. What we now learn is that Godzilla, far from being a solo act, is the front man for the Titans: supersized creatures, dormant beneath the earth, and half as old as time. They include Rodan, a volcano-based dragonoid whose wings are fretted with fire; Mothra, a flying insect of rare beauty, which, like all moths, should be kept well away from your cashmere sweaters; and a mammoth-flavored enormity whose name I didn’t catch. Also present is King Ghidorah, a real piece of work. Stealing his style from the Hydra of Greek mythology, he has three screeching heads, which occasionally squabble among themselves but, when on form, can trounce the competition. Fighting Ghidorah is like doing battle with the Bee Gees.
Stayin’ alive, amidst the chaos, is a handful of negligible humans. The joke is that many of them are played by actors who, given half a chance, can be as wondrous to behold as any monster; what slays the joke is that the movie, directed by Michael Dougherty, gives them, at best, a quarter of a chance, or a sixteenth. Sally Hawkins, whose knack for befriending the bestial was demonstrated in “The Shape of Water” (2017), is wasted here as a scientist. Ditto David Strathairn as an admiral. Vera Farmiga plays Emma Russell, who has invented an acoustic device, the Orca, that can tune in to Titans. (The film probably cost around two hundred million dollars, so it’s touching to note that the Orca seems to be made from an old oscilloscope found on eBay for thirty-five bucks.) Emma’s daughter, Madison, aged fourteen, is played by Millie Bobby Brown, the prodigy from the TV series “Stranger Things,” who has one moment—enshrined in the trailer—when she turns not to scream but to smile, with a kind of knowing relief, at Godzilla’s approach. That moment makes the movie.
It has long been a boast of monster flicks that they glow with metaphorical intent. The original “Godzilla” came out in Japan less than a decade after Hiroshima, and a recent contribution to the legend, “Shin Godzilla” (2016), was received, and praised, as a scalding comment on the Japanese government’s response to real-life calamities—the earthquake and tsunami of 2011, and the subsequent meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. What’s sad about “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” is its attempt, both earnest and lily-livered, to maintain that moral tradition; Dougherty isn’t quite sure whether to wow us with the hulking immensity of the action scenes or to wag his finger at us for the environmental hubris of our species. While some of the characters want to live in peace with Godzilla and the gang, others want to kick the bejesus out of them, which is easier said than done.
But wait. There is a third way, represented by Jonah Alan, “a former British army colonel turned eco-terrorist.” That’s not the most obvious of career moves, but it gets results; Alan basically nips around the world, hauls lazy Titans out of bed, and tells them to start monstering. He believes that the planet is rightfully theirs, that we are mere undeserving tenants who have trashed the place, and that the sooner we are mown down and composted the better. Alan is supposed to be the villain of the piece, but many viewers will instinctively side with him, not least because he’s played by Charles Dance, who is fresh from “Game of Thrones,” and whose dry, unhurried wit makes him terribly hard to argue with. Need instant help from Godzilla with your downsizing? Feel like selling your car and flying everywhere by Mothra? Not a problem. Let the rewilding begin. ♦
