Dexter Fletcher
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The Canadian cold has already inspired 1993's Cool Runnings, the warmly comic tale of the Jamaican bobsled team, and now it's produced Dexter Fletcher's Eddie the Eagle, a less than subtle biopic about the finest – that is, only – British ski jumper of his generation.
Not only did the Calgary Games produce the phenom of the Jamaican bobsled team — immortalized in the cheerful 1993 Disney movie “Cool Runnings” — but a bumbling bundle of fan catnip named Michael “Eddie” Edwards, the first British athlete to compete in the Olympic ski-jump competition, and an instant symbol of innocence, perseverance and irrepressible can-do-ism.
There’s a pat quality to all this that recalls lots of previous movies, including “Cool Runnings,” Jon Turteltaub’s surprise 1993 hit about the unlikely success of the Jamaican bobsled team in the same 1988 games.
The others were 1992’s The Cutting Edge and 1993’s Cool Runnings, both of which are about unlikely competitors achieving greatness (although The Cutting Edge was as much a romance as a sports movie).
Hell, this isn’t even the first movie about a plucky underdog at those Olympics; Calgary ’88 was the year that gave us Cool Runnings’ Jamaican bobsled team (who get a winking in-joke reference in Eddie).
Disney may be king of the underdog sports drama, but actor-turned-director Dexter Fletcher aims to beat the studio at its own game with this inspirational true story that’s equal parts “Rudy” and “Cool Runnings.”
We’ve seen moldbreakers in recent years like Rocketman, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, and Better Man, though maybe that’s because the people who made those films are either genuinely creative or have seen Walk Hard.
While most musical biopics adhere to clichés and rigid creative parameters, the most effective examples, like “Rocketman” and “Straight Outta Compton,” and even to a lesser degree “Elvis,” succeed because they embrace artistic license and point of view or at least attempt to reframe their subjects.
You’ll get your occasional Better Man, Rocketman, and tick, tick… BOOM!: What makes these projects stand out amongst the rest is their ability and willingness to portray the artist in question from a vulnerable lens.
The best musician biopics—movies like Rocketman, Elvis, and Better Man—never forget their subjects are mortal.
…it still fails to creatively play with an overdone genre to the levels of surprisingly subversive and emotionally resonant biopics like the Elton John musical Rocketman…
Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner’s Daughter, Jeremy Allen White in Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Taron Egerton in Rocketman all did their own singing, even with the risk of not measuring up to the icons they played who were all still alive when their films came out.
Feeling more akin to Moulin Rouge! than Walk the Line , Rocketman is a refreshingly confident retelling of the key moment’s in Elton John’s life.
John’s songs are notoriously unambiguous in their topics—his ballad “Your Song” famously proved a good vehicle for Ewan McGregor’s character’s romantic declaration to Nicole Kidman’s character in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! —and their lyrics provide him with a way for his onscreen avatar to express himself quite literally.
Loosely, think of a meeting between Moulin Rouge! and Hairspray , in the way this movie is so proudly built on the house of hits, and relishes the opportunity to give them high stakes through make-believe sound stages and everyday conversations sung entirely in earnest.
We’ve seen this level of visual opulence in musicals before (films such as “Across the Universe” and “Moulin Rouge!” did so with much greater confidence and delivery) and every year we see some sort of narrative that follows this path, but Fletcher and screenwriter Lee Hall lean into Elton’s open vulnerability.
All of those moments, though, are only the notes behind the songs which Rocketman brings to screen, because the film is a mad audiovisual treat that made me think of Moulin Rouge! .
Mamma Mia! (2008)
Directed by Phyllida Lloyd
influenced Rocketman (2019), Eddie the Eagle (2016)
Visuals Plot
Fletcher is channeling All That Jazz and Absolute Beginners but with a Hairspray meets Mamma Mia! high-gloss glittery shimmer, the grit and angst of the tortured artist juxtaposed against a Technicolor milieu that’s been art directed and costumed within an inch of its rockabilly heart.
Russell, who died eight years ago, would have been an ideal director for Rocketman , a musical about John that combines the jukebox format, where existing hits are strung together to tell a story, with the biopic, which asks that the story in question be at least broadly factual – a Bohemian Rhapsody as opposed to a Mamma Mia! Dexter Fletcher, who directed Rocketman and some of Bohemian Rhapsody (he stepped in when the original film-maker was fired) is a former actor whose credits include Ken Russell’s Gothic , so he’s no stranger to the far-out way of doing things.
Rocketman is also, of course, a close relation to Mamma Mia! and all those repertoire-rifling jukebox musicals that now rule the world’s theater stages.
Any major studio that gets its hands on the rights to a rock star’s music and desires to retrofit it into a movie for the fans to drive down memory lane has two options: A biopic that episodically lines up snippets of the artist’s life, like last year’s bafflingly popular Bohemian Rhapsody, or a jukebox musical that integrates the beloved hits into an original story like the gaudy Mamma Mia! or the sublime Across the Universe.
The non-stop soundtrack of pseudo-Vangelis synth-pomp and cheesy Eighties pop hits gets quite annoying (it culminates, as it had to, with Van Halen 's "Jump"), but Eddie the Eagle might just tap into that teeming ocean of Saturday night punter-hood that lies somewhere between Mamma Mia! and Made in Dagenham.
And yet, when you consider all the wonderful ways that Elton John’s music has elevated movies over the years — from his original soundtracks for “Friends” and “The Lion King” to the way Cameron Crowe repurposed “Tiny Dancer” in “Almost Famous” — Fletcher’s inventive numbers face stiff competition.
(This theory would also make sense for anyone who’s repeatedly watched the “Tiny Dancer” singalong tour bus scene in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous .)
Elton John’s music has graced cinemas before: you might remember it from key scenes in Almost Famous (‘Tiny Dancer’), Moulin Rouge (‘Your Song’); 27 Dresses (‘Bennie and the Jets’), or the 2011 animated film Gnomeo and Juliet .
“Tiny Dancer” actually manages to escape Almost Famous for a minute, by embodying John’s inner monologue at a party.
Almost Famous is unforgettable after a ‘Tiny Dancer’ sing-along.
Mostly more snippets than full songs, the eclectic numbers include a magnificent Pleasantville -esque take on The Bitch is Back , I Want Love as a dinner table lament, reclaiming Tiny Dancer from Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous by staging it as the surveying of party scene, turning Honky Cat into the aspirations-achieved showstopper and using a Greek chorus of restaurant diners to add extra resonance to Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word .
The result might remind one of the (perhaps apocryphal) remark that Heath Ledger is supposed to have made when he lost the Best Actor Oscar (for “Brokeback Mountain”) to Philip Seymour Hoffman (for “Capote”)—“I thought it was for the best acting, not the most acting.”
Call Me By Your Name (2017) and Brokeback Mountain (2005) also depicted gay sex but was made by smaller studio off-shoots with limited cinema releases.
By the time “Bolero” pops up on the soundtrack, well, you’re more than primed for the slow motion jump, with Eddie’s very intent facial expression.
Paramount seems to be relying on a narrow definition of “major studio” (was United Artists not a major studio when it made Cruising back in 1980?) to position itself as a trailblazer in the event that Rocketman , a major summer bet for the company, should underperform at the box office; never mind that the movie is an unabashed musical and decidedly less pandering than, say, Bohemian Rhapsody (the inevitable comparisons to which I will get to shortly).
In an effort to squeeze every last dollar out of Middle America, Bohemian Rhapsody often tried to downplay Freddie’s fondness for the lads, with risible scenes that played like G-rated outtakes from William Friedkin’s notorious 1980 dud Cruising .
Directed with fittingly broad strokes by Dexter Fletcher, “Eddie the Eagle” may or may not become another “Billy Elliot,” but it ought to mark Egerton (“Kingsman: The Secret Service”) as an actor worth watching.
Actually, though, in movie terms, Eddie the Eagle is almost exactly like that: if “Billy Elliot on skies” was not part of the pitch meeting, I can’t imagine what else got the greenlight for this almost entirely fictional biopic of the unlikely English ski-jumper, who exploited the loophole of no actual British ski-jumping team existing, then finished dead last as a goofy crowd favorite.
The script is peppered with on-the-nose comparisons to previous underdogs, especially the bobsled shenanigans of Cool Runnings and Billy Elliot's yearning.
There's a long and successful strain of British films about unlikely outcasts following their dreams, including Stephen Daldry's Billy Elliot, where a coal-miner's son pursues a passion for ballet, and Eddie the Eagle neatly sets up the familiar dynamic of parental doubt and wider disbelief.
That's a real surprise, considering this brand of story — the plucky nobody who unexpectedly excels at sports — has been with us since the days of silent cinema, when Harold Lloyd proved himself to be a gangly gridiron great in the uproarious 1925 comedy classic The Freshman.
Yet, it is assembled with such love for its central character and his determined mission, its seams held together by an upbeat synthesizer score that sounds like outtakes from the Rocky IV (1986) soundtrack, that you’d have to be pretty cynical yourself not to feel some tingling of excitement when Eddie soars, even if he lands many, many meters behind the competition.
(It would not be surprising to find out that Rocky IV was a major influence here.)
Egerton has real range: he is unrecognizable here compared to his working-class spy in Kingsman: The Secret Service , and neither character looks anything like his soft WWI-era intellectual turned soldier in Testament of Youth .
But in 1987, the year before the Winter Games in Calgary, Canada, the British Olympic Association Committee doesn’t want anything to do with the awkward Eddie (Egerton, of “Testament of Youth” ) and bans him from joining the team.
The others were 1992’s The Cutting Edge and 1993’s Cool Runnings, both of which are about unlikely competitors achieving greatness (although The Cutting Edge was as much a romance as a sports movie).
The sniveling upper-crust dick who stands in Eddie’s way doesn’t feel like your average movie stuffed shirt; he’s written and played like Ted Knight in Caddyshack, or the antagonist in the ‘80s snobs-vs.-slobs…
Egerton’s character still strikes viewers as an endearing picture of hope, all awkward mannerisms, owlish glasses, and a jaw jut that might be the most committed actorly facial contortion since Billy Bob Thornton in “Sling Blade.”
British obsessiveness in the face of reason can make for fascinating drama – consider David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai – and it simplifies the triumph, and personal ramifications, of Eddie's celebrated turn at Calgary.
And while Jackman is better known for wearing muscles and claws as Wolverine, the Australian A-lister also plays the flawed father figure well (see: the underrated Real Steel).
This type of character is so prevalent—including Jason Sudeikis playing one just last week in Race—that Hugh Jackman has already played pretty much the same character in Real Steel.
It’s the same role Jackman had in “Real Steel.”
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
Directed by Michael Powell
influenced Eddie the Eagle (2016)
Themes
His story is, after all, a story of Britishness, like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp .
But the British have always had a soft spot for stories about plucky losers and Dexter Fletcher ’s comic biopic nestles neatly alongside the likes of The Full Monty , Brassed Off and Calendar Girls .
Add coke-bottle-strength eyeglasses, and the transformation begins to look more tricky than need be, in a world where Trailer Park Boys’ Bubbles could waltz in and do the same thing.