Directing: B-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

If you were already a fan of George Michael, then the documentary Freedom Uncut is likely worth your time. Otherwise, I’m not entirely sure.

We are told at the beginning that Michael was putting “the finishing touches” on this film when he died, on Christmas Day in 2016. That was five and a half years ago. There’s a deeply awkward attempt at a “sexy spin” by Kate Moss in a swivel chair to introduce the film, dated 2017. I had wondered why it had taken so long for any kind of release, but checked IMDb and discovered this had previous iterations: a Showtime documentary film just called George Michael: Freedom in 2017; then George Michael Freedom : The Director’s Cut in 2018. I guess this was just a special engagement theatrical release. Why am I even bothering to review it? Well, I did see it in a theater. Whatever.

Anyway, I am indeed a George Michael fan, and so I enjoyed this movie—mostly—but I also found it almost disappointingly self-indulgent. Michael was also charmingly self-deprecating and quick to admit his faults, but there’s still something about the fact that he is credited as co-director (with David Austin). Something made entirely by someone else would likely have been more reliably objective. George Michael is understanding about his criticisms, but arguably unapologetic to a fault. I can’t speak as confidently about how it would have been received in 2016, but from the vantage point of 2022, his winning the 1989 American Music Award for “Best Soul/R&B Album” is a little . . . cringey. Michael, on the other hand, at least at the time, was quick to defend himself: he’s proud of the accomplishment; he didn’t make the choice, the voters did. There’s no accounting for taste on the part of American Music Awards voters.

Freedom: Uncut had a strange presentation, beginning with the original music video for “Freedom ‘90” in its entirety, with no credit or title cards. That was followed with a full promotional video for his 1996 album Older, as though it were that year right now and we were being primed for its release. For a minute I began to wonder if I had misunderstood this as a documentary film and we were just going to sit through a bunch of videos. Then we see Kate Moss in the swivel chair, and she tells us this film was George Michael’s “final work.”

The film goes into a fair amount of detail regarding George Michael’s initial rise to superstardom, after initial fame with WHAM! (but literally nothing whatsoever about how or why WHAM! split up, after only two album releases in the early and mid-eighties) and then releasing his seminal work, Faith, in 1987. There are multiple references to George Michael being the best-selling artist in the world in 1988, using that fact to justify comparisons to superstars like Michael Jackson, Madonna, or Prince. There’s a key difference between George Michael and all those other artists, however: Michael Jackson and Madonna both released several albums that each sold over 10 million copies, and while Prince had only one album to exceed that amount, he was so prolific and had so many albums that went multiplatinum he outsold George Michael as well.

And George Michael had just that one megahit with Faith, which hardly puts him in the same league. His 1990 follow-up, Listen Without Prejudice Vol. I, sold 8 million copies worldwide and that’s a stunning achievement considering his infamous refusal to take part in any promotion of it whatsoever—he wouldn’t even put his own photo on the album cover. He wanted the music to speak for itself, and there’s some integrity in that; the choice to pack his video for “Freedom ‘90” exclusively with lip syncing models is now iconic.

But is it that memorable, thirty years later? Consider this: at the concession stand at the movie last night, the young woman at the register was 19 years old. That means she was born in 2003. She asked us what movie we were seeing, and when we told her, she said she didn’t know who George Michael was. The sad truth is, this is a guy who died five and a half years ago, and didn’t even have a modicum of cultural relevance since his 1998 arrest for cruising in a Los Angeles public bathroom, and the cheeky single he wrote about it for the release of a greatest-hits package the same year.

Even by that point, George Michael had only released three full length studio albums. He only released another two after that, both completely unnoticed, the most recent in 2004, a good 12 years before he died. It probably tells us something that this film had a single showing in theaters and even that had maybe a third of the seats sold, residual effects of a pandemic notwithstanding. In other words, Freedom: Uncut exaggerates the lasting cultural impact of George Michael a bit—at least in the United States; we do see James Corden speaking about how he’s “part of the fabric” of culture in the UK, and I obviously can’t speak to that.

The impact he had on fans can’t be denied, nor can the impact of mega-stardom on him, which was the reason for his about-face with promoting his work only three years after Faith was released. Older was important thematically to his life, as the album is largely about the love of his life dying of AIDS and his eventual coming out. The film is engaging and interesting; it’s just that its mileage will vary depending on a host of factors, including both how big a fan you are and whether you even know who he was.

*I’ll say this much: the man knew how to fill out a pair of jeans.*

Overall: B