What the Fuck Was Sia Thinking When She Made The Notorious 2021 Film Flop Music?
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
I don’t always notice patterns in my writing but I suppose it is a striking coincidence that I am following a My World of Flops/Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 piece on The Idol, an infamous, widely reviled and controversial flop from the mind of The Weeknd, a massive pop star with fuck-all experience writing or directing television or movies, with Sia’s equally notorious 2021 bomb Music.
Music just happens to also be an infamous, widely reviled and controversial flop from the mind of Sia, a massive pop star with fuck-all experience writing or directing television or movies.
It’s easy to see where Sia and The Weeknd might have gotten the idea that they should be in charge of ambitious, involved productions despite a glaring lack of experience in film and television respectively.
If you travel around the world in a private plane, stay in the finest hotels and perform before thousands of screaming fans who have paid handsomely for the privilege of being there you’d probably also labor under the delusion that you could do anything and do it brilliantly.
According the Guinness Book of World Records, The Weeknd is the most popular musician in the world. That seems like bullshit to me but if it’s true—and how on earth would you quantify something like that?—it means that The Weeknd isn’t just doing well: he’s doing better than every other singer, rapper, songwriter or musician in the world.
That kind of treatment can’t help but inflate the ego. It also led The Weeknd and Sia to pursue projects that were insanely ambitious for a first timer and about tricky, complicated and ultimately dangerous subject matter.
The Idol is about mental illness, sexual assault, cults, brainwashing, Keith Raniere, Britney Spears, exploitation, BDSM, bondage and exhibitionism. Music, meanwhile, involves Autism, AIDS, using drugs, selling drugs, the death of a beloved caretaker and a new caretaker whose first instinct is to drop her new charge off at what she glibly refers to as “The People Pound.”
The Idol and Music both ran drunkenly through an endless field full of landmines and leaped on every one. They weren’t just DOA; they were blown to fucking bits by the time audiences and critics had an opportunity to be insulted and repulsed by them.
Music, incidentally could have been even worse and even more problematic. It was initially not a musical and would have starred either Shia LeBeouf or Jonah Hill in the role of a troubled older sibling who must take care of their autistic younger sister after their grandmother dies.
Then they gave Sia ten million more dollars to make Music a Musical and the co-writer-director saw a clip of Kate Hudson singing and decided to radically re-imagine her passion project as a Kate Hudson musical.
There are many things wrong about Music. The biggest might be that it was sold, badly and inaccurately as a musical about an autistic girl and her exuberant, colorful inner life. It’s not that movie. Music is, perversely enough, not really about Music, an autistic girl whose life is thrown into turmoil when her grandmother dies and she becomes the custody of her fuck-up older sister.
It’s not about Ebo Odom (Leslie Odom Jr.), the saintly African boxing instructor and unusually pure Magical Negro who kindly, patiently teaches Music’s older sister how to care for Music and also how to be a good person, either.
Music is not about an Autistic girl. It’s not about a black man with HIV. It IS, however, about a straight, neurotypical white woman played by a superstar actress whose mom and stepdad are two of the greatest movie stars of all time.
Sia, who claimed to be on the Autism Spectrum after the film was released and eviscerated by the Autism community, seems interested in Music and Ebo largely, if not exclusively, because they are magical creatures who help a Live Laugh Love type white lady be strong enough to stop using AND selling drugs and not abandon her sister because it’s the easy and convenient thing to do.
Music and Ebo aren’t characters with agency and needs and desires so much as they’re helpers whose main purpose is to set the attractive, straight white neurotypical woman on the right path.
Music opens with the death of Music’s grandmother and caretaker. Music’s mother is dead so it falls upon Kazu "Zu" Gamble (Hudson), her older half sister, to look after her.
The briefly sober Zu is more interested in relapsing and getting back into a party lifestyle than in looking after Music. Zu tries to get the state to pick up Music and take her to a care facility. When that proves unsuccessful she only half-jokes to her neighbor Obo that she plans to drop her off at the aforementioned “People Pound.”
Obo is understandably chagrined to hear Zu talk about a girl he cares for and understands like she’s a misbehaving puppy who isn’t housebroken yet. But he’s not so put off that he doesn’t selflessly teach her how to care for Music.
It doesn’t take long for Zu to fall spectacularly off the wagon and go back to selling drugs for Rudy (Ben Schwartz). Rudy is a drug dealer with cornrows who talks about his abuela yet he’s played by the wacky funster who voices Sonic the Hedgehog.
Is Schwartz supposed to be Spanish? I don’t know but the casting is very odd. It’s similar to a heavy scene late in the film where a random dude briefly comes out of his apartment and he’s played by Henry Rollins.
How are you going to NOT be distracted by Henry Rollins just popping up and then disappearing as quickly and inexplicably as he appeared? That is not even the most distracting cameo in the movie.
That would belong to Sia herself. The co-writer/director pops up as herself as one of Zu’s high roller clients. Zu says she’s buying as many painkillers as possible so that she can distribute them to people who are suffering in the third world as sort of a “Pop Stars Without Borders” deal.
Is she joking? Is the film joking? If she is joking, is the joke that she’s on a crazy amount of drugs or that she’s a selfless humanitarian? I have no idea. What I do know is that seeing Sia show up in Sia’s movie as either a saint or a drug fiend is every bit as distracting as the notorious moment in Fred Durst’s The Fanatic where the hero asks his son if he wants to listen to Limp Bizkit in the car.
At least she’s not doing blackface! Oh wait, she kinda is!
It’s hard to tell what Sia was going for because the tone shifts wildly. You might think, for example, that playing a drug addict and a drug dealer with a dead mother and a dead grandmother would require a certain gravitas.
Yet Hudson inexplicably delivers the same cheerful, upbeat, “You gotta love me” romantic comedy turn she’d give in a movie pairing her yet again with Matthew McConaughey.
Musical sequences that suggest what the music videos of Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze might look and feel like if they did not possess any talent have a decidedly different tone than the rest of the film.
These musical set-pieces are initially supposed to represent Music’s inner life and fantasies. But it isn’t long until other characters, particularly Zu and Obo, begin dominating them.
Music maddeningly is not the star of Music. Even more bewilderingly she’s not even the star of her own fantasies and dreams. I don’t want to be overly harsh on Ziegler, because she was a child when she made Music but her performance is distressingly one note. She’s either grinning big and sashaying happily through life or melting down. There’s no in between but the movie does not seem terribly interested in her after a certain point.
In a key bit of dialogue Obo tells Zu that being Autistic, Music won’t change because she can’t change. It’s a problematic sentiment but it also speaks to the film’s not so hidden agenda: Music doesn’t change so the film has no real interest in her. Obo doesn’t have to change because he is literally perfect. The person who can change and must change is, again, the kind of character you see in lots of movies that have nothing to do with Autism.
Sia apparently shot Music in 2017, then spent three years editing it. Yet it is nevertheless full of bizarre, inexplicable choices and moments begging for the cutting room floor. For example one of the beneficiaries of Obo’s kindness and teaching is murdered by his abusive father.
The young man is barely in the movie but after he dies he starts popping up in Music’s fantasies and in the film’s musical sequences, which are both its raison d’être and something that could be cut without hurting the film.
As the father of two Autistic boys as well as a film writer Music offended me on multiple levels. Sia’s heart was unmistakably in the right place. If she’d made this movie in 1995 she’d probably be heralded for having an autistic character in a central role. We’ve come a long way since then, however.
Representation is no longer enough. Good intentions are no longer enough. A movie like Music needs to walk a fine line and Sia’s peppy dud staggers confusedly and ends up someplace deeply embarrassing and at least moderately offensive.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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