Review: A devastating and credible 'Leaving Neverland' will turn you off Michael Jackson for good
Michael Jackson poses for a photo with a young Wade Robson. By Hank Stuever Hank Stuever TV critic Email Bio Follow TV critic February 28 at 7:00 AM It’s remarkable what happens when you take Michael Jackson out of the latest Michael Jackson scandal. Remove the usual “King of Pop” soundtrack and all that glitters, and things get so much clearer.
From left, Wade Robson, director Dan Reed and James Safechuck at the Sundance Film Festival in January to promote “Leaving Neverland.” A similar heap of past journalistic efforts, to say nothing of Jackson’s acquittal in a prolonged and hotly prosecuted 2005 molestation trial, accompanies the unsettling facts that “Leaving Neverland” presents so unflinchingly.
There’s a familiar echo in the Jackson family’s protest — a strategy Robson and Safechuck remember from being persuaded to defend Michael in court and depositions whenever he felt threatened: In Michael’s world, his enemies live to make up terrible lies so that they can steal his money and ruin his name. In that fragile falsetto that became his public speaking voice, Michael decried his haters long before it was cool to have haters, playing his charitable side to an advantage.
In Brisbane, Australia, a 5-year-old Robson won a shopping-mall dance contest in 1987 that included tickets to see Jackson in concert and meet him backstage. Two years later, on a repeat encounter, Robson — now 7 and sporting a perm so his hair would look more his idol’s — got another chance to meet Jackson and impress him with his dance moves. Before they could process what was happening, the middle-class Robson family was whisked away to America and Jackson’s inner circle.
A compelling aspect of “Leaving Neverland” is the similarity of the boys’ accounts of these encounters — and how they mirror accounts that came later, in 1993 and in 2005 . The Michael Jackson molestation stories all wind up being eerily alike — the disarming ability to charm, the showering of gifts for the whole family, the air of innocence and friendship that made it all seem okay.
Not long after Robson’s family arrived in California, they got a chillier reception from Jackson’s camp, discovering that another, much more famous boy — the actor Macaulay Culkin — had become Michael’s new best friend. Michael Jackson leaves court in California on April 8, 2005. Taking all this in, one can and should wonder: What about the music?
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