If you’ve read RJ Smith’s biography “The One” you might find yourself enjoying Tate Taylor’s “Get On Up” despite itself. Taylor, who directed “The Help” last year, should but doesn’t bother with the substance of biography: a man is born, lived and dies and this is what he did. But if you’ve read “The One” it doesn’t matter as much, you fill in the gaps for yourself. However, if you come into James Brown a little colder, with less background, you will leave bewildered.
The problem is, 138 minutes to tell a story that should have been an HBO mini-series: Tate can’t get the story told in the time allocated, so he uses segues, flashbacks and shortcuts and it doesn’t work. He refuses to set up a scene, they just start and end; there are no transitional scenes, no straightforward narrative. This is hugely disappointing because Chadwick Boseman -so good as Jackie Robinson, gives a towering performance as James Brown, and the musical performances, with Boseman an astoundingly great Brown, lipsyncing to some of the most famous of Brown’s song, are so so so worth your time. Not the later stuff, not the stuff from 93 or even 88, but the really young stuff, Brown on the chitlin circuit stuff, a shattering “Caldonia” -that is really why we are here and Taylor get s it right.
Boseman is such a sad thing, he is giving the performance of a lifetime without a script to keep it anchored in any reality, he is James Brown as Billy Pilgrim. Towards the end, Tate has all the characters in the various times of his life chaning “James Brown” -it makes no sense at all, it is artistic sleight of hand and it doesn’t work the same reason the movie doesn’t work: it is a restless precise of true emotions.
Taylor does so much right here, but what he does wrong fails it so badly. He could have sold it to HBO and given himself the scope and time to tell the story the way it deserves to be told, or it could tell just part of the story, the Boston gig the day after MLK’s assassination would have been a great story to tell. So there is no time to tell the story and some of the acting is abysmal, Craig Robinson -an actor I really enjoy, has nothing to do with Maceo Parker whatsoever and it is to Brandon Smith’s credit he is so credible as Little Richard. Dan Aykroyd is charming as Brown’s manager, and Nelsan Ellis does what he can with his role as Brown’s best friend Bobby Byrd. Octavia Spencer is terribly used as brothel owning Aunt Honey though she does fall into the movies epitaph: “I guess everybody has to be somewhere sometime.”
The stage shows, the T.A.M.I. Show, a 71 live show and especially the 1962 Apollo Theatre gig were everything you could hope and all praise to Taylor and Chase, you can see five movies and not watching this good. The best scene in the movie has Brown rehearsing the famous Flames where he decides to change the drum part but won’t let the rest of the band change their parts: it is a lesson in arrangement, it is also a lesson in genius. But is it enough?
Grade: B+
