Freedom

The new George Michael documentary from Channel 4 is two dimensional, but a surefire fan-pleaser


As always happens in the ensuing months after the death of a musical icon, a trickle of posthumous releases and biopics have begun to drip out from George Michael. So far, Nile Rogers has shared a shiny new re-working of Fantasy and there are murmurings of other musical outputs as well. It’s always difficult to know whether or not the deceased would have actually wanted this for all to hear. However, that’s not the case with Freedom, as George was editing it himself up until four days before his death in December last year.

It kicks off with Kate Moss sitting across an armchair in a pair of leather trousers The first couple of parts cover his beginnings with Wham!, the ensuing breakup, and his first solo release with ‘Faith’ where he pretty much conquered the world at the tender age of 24. These veer a little too much into that dusty BBC4-style, talking head format, where famous people stare at a record player wistfully and sigh ‘just…incredible’. We can live without Mark Ronson calling Listen Without Prejudice a ‘Mona Lisa’, or James Corden saying Carpool Karaoke wouldn’t have started if George hadn’t taken part in a Comic Relief sketch with him. It does make you question whether his legacy has been entirely positive.

That’s not to say there aren’t a few worthwhile contributors. Liam Gallagher puts in a typically aggrandising shift, giving him the highest praise he can think of: ‘yer’ve got Lennon in yer’. Collaborators Mary J Blige and Stevie Wonder also pop up and are highly complimentary, while Ricky Gervais revisits the brilliantly self-deprecating cameo George made in Extras. You’d think that these hagiographic testimonies were a case of bandgwagon-jumping, but this whole documentary was made while George was still alive. It’s testament to his impact that so many were willing to buy an advance ticket for that wagon.

The best part of the film covers George’s self-professed worst years. It’s an understatement to say that he had a difficult start to the 90s. His first love was cruelly snatched away by AIDS, he suffered a critical backlash for winning black music awards for Faith, he was trapped in a creatively oppressive contract by his record label, and to top it all off, his mother also passed away. There’s some previously unseen home footage of George frolicking carelessly around with Anselmio, the Brazilian he met while performing in Rio after which they quickly fell for each other. It’s heartbreaking to watch, especially with his mournful narration, which turned out to be his last recorded interview. It also shines a light on some of his most celebrated public performances at the time where nobody else really knew the inner turmoil he was going through. None more so than his appearance at the Freddy Mercury Tribute Concert doing Somebody to Love, just at the time he discovered he was about to lose the only person that he’d ever loved.

The documentary was only supposed to only focus on the release of Listen Without Prejudice, but we got George’s early years and the court case after. However, anything after about 1995, there’s absolutely nothing. We get a brief mention of his coming out, but the Snappy Snap years are wholly omitted. If you were completely unfamiliar with him, you’d think he’d died before the turn of the millennium. It feels highly guarded and mega-fans tuning in are unlikely to learn anything new.

This is to be expected of course, with George at the helm. After recently watching Can I Be Me?, Nick Broomfield’s muckraking Whitney biopic, you have to be glad for him that he got out this overwhelmingly positive account of his life out. In somebody else’s hands, it could’ve been a lot less forgiving. However, it does make for a slightly pedestrian final watch.

This is summed up nowhere better than in a returning scene running throughout the whole documentary, where a camera slowly zooms into the back of George Michael sitting at a typewriter in his Highgate home. You’re desperate for it to pan round and give us a final glimpse of George, but it never does and it’s revealed in the credits that it was a stunt double all along. Sure, he deserves a chance to control his legacy, but it doesn’t stop it being slightly underwhelming.

Freedom is on Channel 4 on Monday 16th October at 9pm

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