Get On Up

Get On Up

I know very little about the life of James Brown, and therefore cannot comment on the generalizations about him in Get on up. More easily put, accuracy isn’t its bag. When asked in an interview how he works, Brown’s biopic director, Tate Taylor quipped, ‘It’s a nonlinear biography.’ A paradoxical statement because he is more focused on the extreme points of his narrative ‘It’s a life of vice and grace in the ordinary and extraordinary.’ It comes across as energetic, brutalist and honest.

Flashbacks to 1988 feature the most notorious incarceration of Brown (Chadwick Boseman), who was no longer a household name during those years. While facing jealous tantrums of drug addiction, the celebrity shows up to one of his offices located in a trailer park in Augusta, Georgia. On that occasion, he charged into the office of the next room equipped with a shotgun, shouting demands to discover who has misused his bathroom: “Which one of you gentle folk hung a No. 2 in my commode?” he is screaming.

After a worried lady points a finger at herself, she is startled to see Brown suddenly treat her in a fatherly manner and tell her: “You did right by yourself. There ain’t no other way to live.” She makes a good point to begin her biography of a dignified lady that the United States recognizes without any turbulence. There is no doubt that it is a strange way to begin an ostentatious biopic. Restarding this method, Boxer has expelled its own life to Brown, whose life is simply too complicated to be sanitized without fear of adverse publicity.

We then shift our attention to one of the tense moments from Brown’s history, as he and his bandmates are on a plane that’s under duress during the Vietnam war. “They tried to kill James Brown today!” he screams in disbelief. “Who the fuck in their right mind would want to go down in history as the one that killed the funk?” This is Brown, fat and bald, at the peak of his life, but not as a pop star, but as a vile ‘pop’ figure, and an eccentric pop figure at that which brings a certain heft to the argument of them being larger than life.

And then, just like that, we move to the 1930s, and young James in Georgia in a dilapidated shack in the woods. So presses his father in pounding his mother into a still aghast Brown as he is able to observe how this very brute still attracts her somehow a gentle indictment that Brown was given some perverse education about men and women at rather early years.

Here’s the twist the card-bearing and time-jumping elements are not completely arbitrary. Taylor along with screen writers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth depict scenes with triumphant or inspirational moments, giving it contrast with scenes of utter baseness and horror.

Young James sees the vision of bright future when he steps into the church to see the performer clothed in white singing and dancing, and then sees him sneaking a suit out of a car and getting arrested for the first time. Young James gets a whooping from his dad; then we fast forward to a grown James again singing in the studio only this time the audience is comprised of children with white skin American Kids who are beaming with joy. Hush Hush “It’s a honkey hoedown!” he laughed.

Very often, these elements combined grace and horror exist in one and the same scene: so, for example, there is a very surreal set piece (though probably not inaccurate) in which a James junior attends charity do held by some rich white southern people, during which black boys were stripped to their waist, each bearing a number and blindfolded, and forced to fight each other with one arm. James gets kicked and goes down, but notices a black jazz band right over the flank almost like they are waiting just for him.

Music makes his heart sore, offers him fresh energy, and eventually liberates him.

In this approach, a lot is required of both Boseman and the remaining talented cast (especially Nelsan Ellis, in the role of Brown’s close associate Bobby Byrd). There are no easy story arcs in the film that the actors can use to construct classic character development.

So the performances are along the lines of ‘broad and mannered’ instead of ‘realistic’. The actors go through such strong emotions that entire scenes become one emotional blur. This is how an actor puts across their performance ‘The lines don’t exist, only the contrasts are there’.

Watching Get on Up does not explain well the life context and the nuances of an artist but music isn’t sacrificed to that end. Taylor recreates the experience of James Brown concerts with style and energy, evoking the relentless rhythm of the backing dancers and the excitement of the audience who feel that anything is possible at a James Brown show.

Baseman knows how to move on stage, even if he does not properly channel the wildness of James Brown’s persona his loose arms whipping around and the passion of stage performance making him look crazy. One could also argue that the film operates at that level. It is a positive, vigorous effort to grapple with the stark contradictions of James Brown as an artist while keeping the man circumspect. You will probably leave the movie with more questions than you arrived with.

For more movies Visit Gomovies.