After his incredible success in 2011 with THE HELP, Tate Taylor is back with a biopic on the famous Godfather of Soul: James Brown. GET ON UP shows the entire life of Brown and his career, spread out across a multitude of dancing, humor, and groove. But Taylor has created a double-edged sword as one structural choice both drags and propels the movie. That problem is that Brown’s life is not shown linearly, the plot jumps around so much that it fails to flesh out characters or situations in order to be engaging. Nevertheless, Chadwick Boseman’s performance as the leader of The Famous Flames is so incredibly fun and funky that it carries the movie though its chaos.
The film follows James Brown’s career as he attains more and more success through The Famous Flames and eventually his own talent. His career is shown step by step, but childhood events and other parts of his life thrown in like commercials. Despite this, the film still moves at breakneck pace and can be dizzying. It’s clear that this was done to turn what otherwise might be confusing small life stories about the man interesting as they were placed throughout the movie. Taylor sacrifices cohesion and simplicity to keep the audience engaged in what otherwise might be dry moments of his life. Overall the sacrifice pays off as it creates a much more engaging biopic.
The segments of Brown’s work as a musician are enthralling to watch. The performances from Chadwick Boseman as James Brown and Nelsan Ellis as Bobby Byrd carry the movie. The two play off each other very well, and the brotherhood between the two characters is tangible, and eventually becomes the focus of the movie, as Tate Taylor recognized how this was the most compelling story in the narrative.
One of the surprisingly effective elements of the movie is its songs. Boseman’s energy is magnetic during the movie’s many melodic segments. And the songs were not solely for entertainment the way a musical might use them, but rather as a valuable storytelling element. I can only imagine that those songs were what going to a James Brown concert must have felt like. They were exciting and fun to watch. The dancing was groovy. They made anyone who wasn’t a fan before appreciate James Brown’s work.
The problem is that it often becomes too confusing to keep track of who is who and who matters. Other than Bobby Byrd and James Brown, Dan’s Aykroyd’s character Ben Bart was one of the only other few recognizable characters, but even still I had to look up his character’s name in the end credits. I still don’t know what Octavia Spencer did in the movie, despite being promoted as a main character. She seemed to play a caretaker after Brown’s mother and father left, but she was never mentioned again. It was also difficult to determine who James Brown was married to, as they show a wife and child early in the movie, but then later focus on another woman, never making acknowledgement of what happened to the previous wife.
In following with the films crazy jumping plot and lightning pace, Taylor provides many stylistic features that in the end just don’t fit that well with the movie. The experience will more than once get loud with background noise and do a strange focusing effect that just comes off as weird. For example, after a car chase scene James Brown steps out of his car as in child form… for some reason that escapes me. The movie’s strange structure and funky style make certain parts of the experience unnecessarily confusing, but in the end the impact of James Brown on the world is portrayed energetically by Chadwick Boseman. To describe it using James Brown’s own song titles – It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World, but often, It’s Too Funky in Here.
