Leaving Neverland

Dan Reed's unsettling Leaving Neverland goes beyond describing Michael Jackson's alleged sexual predation of two boys -- Jimmy Safechuck and Wade Robson -- to examining the seductive nature of celebrity and wealth and how it entices ordinarily sensible people to set aside their reflexive guardedness to get next to fame or to protect their idols. 

Safechuck and Robson offer compelling accounts -- painful, distressing testimonies -- of their long-term relationships with Jackson, which encompassed much of their childhoods. It is that element, their youth and their families' unwitting complicity (or irresponsiblity) in giving the boys over to Jackson's tutelage and abuse, that is so grueling. To say that the adult Jimmy and Wade are conflicted about their relationships with Jackson would be as gross an understatement as would be describing their stories of regular, ritual sex play with the pop superstar as "upsetting." They describe what to outsiders sound like a nightmare of manipulation and control, all to placate the appetite and loneliness of a supremely damaged man. Both men say as boys they viewed the sexual contact as their special relationship with Jackson.

Reed's companion interviews with mothers and siblings add levels of frustration to this riveting film because the audience listens to the mothers describe how much they too were enamored of Jackson and were stricken by his generosity and gentleness while we, the audience, know what is to follow: charges from other boys of abuse that paint Jackson as a serial pedophile, hiding his tendencies (crimes?) behind his global image, fairlyland innocence and celebrated gifting to children's causes.

That Jackson is presented as a strange and tragic figure makes it difficult to lay all of our scorn on him even as we hear of the horrors the men's lives became after their close relationship with Jackson was chilled and they were replaced by other younger boys. Both men describe being wracked with depression and self-doubt as adults, hobbled by crippling guilt and sadness, tormented by resentment toward those who should have protected them. Of course, all of this comports with what is generally understood about the adult survivors of child abuse.

Certainly those who believe Safechuck and Robson will pity them for being victimized not only by a man who was accustomed to always getting what he wants, as one of the mothers recounts, but also by a culture that prizes proximity to the rich and famous, sometimes above our own safety and common sense. Those who don't believe the accounts, maybe dismissing them as calculated attacks to squeeze the Jackson estate for money, must come to terms with the unprecedented "normalization" of not only Jackson's ravaged, deracinated appearance but his fixation on boys, which under any other circumstances would have been questioned if not roundly condemned.