Music (2021)

Directed by Sia

I know this isn’t the usual type of movie I review. Even though this film is very scary I wouldn’t call it a horror film, but due to school/work/life/the-ongoing-apocalypse I’ve been rather busy lately. Look for my  “Best of 2021” next week, but until then I just want to give you a little something, something.

If you don’t know what Music is, I envy you, but please allow me to destroy that innocence while I tell you about the film  Music, a musical drama by Australian musician Sia, about Kazu (gesundheit), a young woman who gains custody of her autistic half-sister named Music following their grandmother’s death. Before you ask, no, the girl cast as Music aka Kazu’s autistic sister, is not autistic in real life, but don’t you worry, Maddie Zeigler watched plenty of YouTube videos by people pretending to be autisitc, and she’s pretty sure she has this down! I can’t be too hard on Zeigler, she was only 15 when she acted in this film, but I can, do, and will blame Sia for this, so let’s actually get into what Music is and what it does wrong.

The Events Herein That I Was Subjected To.

As I said above, the plot follows Kazu, a young woman struggling with addiction to alcohol and painkillers, who is summoned back home following the death of her grandmother. When she arrives home to get her Grandmother’s affairs in order, she learns that she will also be responsible for the care of her half-sister Music, a teenage girl who is non-verbal and significantly autistic. While learning Music’s routines and needs, Kazu begins building a relationship with her new neighbor, a boxing instructor at a youth club who coincidentally also had an autistic sibling back home in Ghana, so he knows all about this autism stuff, man. Kazu tries to keep sober, deal drugs, and save money for a trip to Costa Rica so she can teach yoga on the beach for the rest of her days, but her attempts are complicated by Music having like, needs, and shit. If this doesn’t sound like a plot then congratulations, you figured out that there isn’t one!

I Can’t Mince Words Or Be Diplomatic Here.

Music is a breathtakingly awful film. The kind of movie that to begin understanding how bad it is, you need to go back to before the movie even came out. After this movie was shot in 2017, it took more than three years for it to be edited, reportedly because Sia couldn’t find anyone to edit it the way she wanted, but more likely because all the editors she contacted watched the footage and refused to have anything to do with the project. When the editing was finally completed, a trailer was released to universal disdain, critics taking aim at the tone-deaf nature of the casting, in particular, and why Sia felt entitled to be the one to tell this story. At first, Sia maintained her good intentions, but it didn’t take long for her to lash out at her critics and declare that this movie was made as a tribute to “autistic people and their caregivers”, so any type of negative feedback was just people being mean. With all of this in consideration, it really needs to be said that this isn’t just a conceptually bad movie, Music is the cinematic equivalent of that celebrity cover of the song “Imagine” that was released at the start of the Pandemic; bad idea, worse execution, all served with a heaping helping of celebrity smug. If you’ve never seen that video, I’ve linked it below. If you can get through the whole cringefest thing then you deserve a medal!

Let’s Start With The First Thing That’s Wrong: The Characters.

Music is trauma porn. Instead of personalities, the characters have traumatic backstories: Kazu is a drug addict with a dead mom/grandma who is put-upon to take care of her autistic sister, Music is autistic and has a dead grandma and a shitty sister who doesn’t know how to take care of her, Kazu’s new neighbor had his wife leave him for his brother…etc. The list goes on and on, and some of these people have multiple traumatic backstories that get revealed as the movie goes on, because that’s the only way that Sia, who also wrote the movie, knows how to communicate that we should care about someone. None of this trauma ever builds into full characters; we never really learn the story behind the neighbor’s tragic past or how this has affected him, it’s just there because it has to be. My favorite traumatic character is a boy who is forced to box by his abusive adoptive parents, who we literally learn nothing more about than that he is a “kid with a big heart”. Where his character ends up is nothing short of ridiculous, but I’ll get into that later.

Don’t Worry, Everything Else Is Just As Good As The Characters!

I’m explaining so much about these backstories because a huge chunk of the movie is Kazu and her neighbor explaining their tragic backstories to each other and repeatedly going over them together, not really adding anything, just reiterating that these things have happened and are important. Because of this, Music’s pacing is glacial, making an already story light movie feel three hours long. But don’t you worry, we still have time for the musical interludes! Every so often a short music video plays between scenes, I assume the point of these interludes is to give insight into Music’s mind, but hoo boy are they off the mark. If I wanted to see someone dance around and make faces like she’s doing an impression of autistic stereotypes, I’m sure I could find many TikTok videos featuring that, without having to bother with a whole movie. And these songs? Mercifully forgettable. The set design and costumes for the interludes? Hilarious.

If You Hate Consequences, Then Boy This Movie Is For You!

One of the more baffling aspects of Music is how there aren’t really any consequences to anything, which I find strange for how traumatic everyone’s backstory is. When Kazu is causing a drunken disturbance (and violating her parole) and a neighbor calls the police, nothing bad happens. When Kazu loses a grand plus worth of drugs that she had to convince her supplier to entrust her with, nothing bad happens. When a character who we saw watching out for Music on her daily routine dies tragically, nothing bad happens, in fact good things happen! There aren’t stakes, there is no plot, there is just a series of scenes that don’t matter slapped up against each other until we get to the sickening saccharine ending that would be schmaltzy if it happened 20 years ago, but feels like a literal parody when it happens today. 

What’s Really Shocking Here – Besides The Intense Ignorance…

And that’s not even addressing how much this movie gets plain wrong about autism. I won’t bore you with all the details, I’ll just focus on one thing that is very very wrong. The film Music positively portrays the use of a particularly controversial technique used when autistic children have ‘episodes’: restraint therapy. If you don’t know what that is, it is what it sounds like, the child is pushed to the ground on their belly or back and physically held there until they ‘calm down’. There’s a lot of disagreement over when, if ever, this should be necessary, with more focus generally given to de-escalation treatments, and restraint being a last resort. And yes, the use of restraints has killed children, and has certainly injured a lot more. None of this is addressed. Restraint is presented as an effective solution, and this was so controversial that Sia herself issued a public apology and vowed to keep these scenes out of public releases. Fat lot of good that did, cause I saw those scenes in a publicly available format. Good job, Sia!

I’m Kind Of Surprised How Proud Of This Sia Seems.

And where would we be without a self-serving creator cameo from the proud Writer/Director/Producer? Sia herself appears as a generous celebrity who seeks to get around the red-tape of dispensing medical supplies during the Haitian earthquake by buying tons of opioids and shipping them there via her private plane to distribute them. No, that was not a joke, that is the character’s real plan. I have no idea if this was meant to be funny, meant to be ironic, meant to be some commentary on something, but it comes across as ill-conceived at best. It’s a microcosm for the movie, a well intentioned but badly thought out plan that will probably end up hurting a lot more people than it will help. I think Sia had good intentions here. I think she genuinely did want to make a film that was sympathetic towards autistic people. But the problem is she doesn’t have a good enough understanding of what that would look like.

Why This All Pisses Me Off So Much.

I’ll level with you. The reason I’m even talking about this movie instead of laughing at it and ignoring it is because I am autistic and I’ve seen everything in this movie before. It certainly is offensive to have a neurotypical person pretending to be a stereotypical representation of a nonverbal autistic girl, it’s offensive to say this is a movie about an autistic girl and then have her be a prop and a plot device but not a character, and it is definitely offensive to have the eponymous mostly non-verbal autistic girl sing at the end of the movie because look how special and magical this moment is! It’s all offensive, but it isn’t shocking. This is the kind of stuff autistic people have seen over and over and at this point in time there isn’t an excuse to keep getting it wrong. Music is just another movie that has an exceptionally poor handle on a topic it shouldn’t even be discussing in the first place.

It Is What It Is, I’m Afraid. Upwards And Onwards!

I’m not angry, I’m not weeping or crying or gnashing my teeth. I’m just tired. Tired that this is still what the average person, hell, probably what someone who considers herself “woke”, thinks about autistic people. If you managed to get to the end of this rant, then thank you. This has been kind of an emotionally draining review/essay/rant, but it was good to get it off my chest. Next week I’ll be back with something to get 2022 going right! Thanks again!