Roger Ebert Reviews This Is It

Michael Jackson told his fans in London, “This is the last curtain.” The curtains fell sooner than anyone expected. What remains is this extraordinary documentary—something I never expected to see. In this film, he isn’t a sick, addicted man barely keeping himself upright during exhausting rehearsals. Instead, he is a spirit embodied in music. Michael Jackson was different. This documentary is a portrait of Michael Jackson that shows him in a form other than the rumors that he was too weak to carry out the tour. It’s both a showcase of the final concert and a depiction of an artist while he’s working.

He never raises his voice, he never shows his anger, and he always speaks calmly and humbly to the staff and people on stage. Michael and his director, Kenny Ortega, move the production process forward. He corrects the timing, adjusts the cues, and talks about the details of music and dance.

I, who always saw him from a distance, imagined him as the machinery of production. But here we see him as the creator of his show.

Now we know he died with a combination of drugs that led to his cardiac arrest. But this knowledge makes it harder to understand how he could have been in such excellent physical condition. The dance moves he designed with such precision and delicacy, and his sudden, timely movements, are exhausting. He never shows any sign of fatigue. His moves are so well synchronized with the other dancers on stage—so much younger and so much more rehearsed—that it’s as if he has become one of them. This man is such a commander of his physical states that his turns feel as natural as blinking.

He was always first a dancer and then a singer. He doesn’t perform solo pieces exclusively. With the exception of one sweet love ballad, his singing is blended with the voices of four backup singers.

This could have been a full-fledged show. Ortega and the special-effects wizards have matched the film’s pieces with stage performance. There is a scary show element in this performance, in which the madmen rise from their graves (and the spirits that were supposed to fly over the audience’s heads). Michael appears in a scene playing a gunman with Humphrey Bogart, and in another place, a dense forest is shown. He flies inside a contraption above the audience’s heads. But this time, the audience is the stage crew. They’ve seen all these things. They love him. They don’t pretend.

They love him for his music—and maybe even more for his moods and behavior. Rehearsing with big stars is rarely tolerable and effortless. Michael is immersed in a collaborative spirit. He’s ready to do his work and to last until the end.

But how is that possible? Even if his body was ready for the job—which it certainly was—how did he prepare the mental power? When you have a doctor who turns around your head on schedule to inject your drugs, when your idea of a good sleep is being knocked out for 24 hours, how can you get up from sleep with such clever alertness? Stimulants? I don’t think they would have that effect. I was like a hunter in this film, waiting for the moment when he would be shown under the influence of a narcotic drug. But I couldn’t see anything. There must be a reason—among all the people present in the rehearsals, he’s the only one who always has long sleeves.

Well, we don’t know how he did it. This Is It confirms that he did. He didn’t disappoint the people who invested in him or his collaborators. He was completely ready for the opening of the concert. He and Kenny Ortega, who also directed this film, were at their peak. There’s a powerful scene related to the last day of rehearsal in the film, when Jackson and Ortega join the others in a circle with their hands tied together and thank them. But the concert they worked on with this intensity never happened.

This is the end now.

Source: eMJey / rogerebert.com