‘Elton John: Never Too Late’ Review: A Rock Superstar Portrait Stuffed With Archival Wealth but Starved of Self-Reflection
For a film co-directed by its subject’s husband, David Furnish, Elton John: Never Too Late, while always entertaining, feels curiously impersonal and lacking in intimacy. If you want to revisit the glory days of John’s career, when he released an astonishing 13 albums in the five-year span of 1970-75, seven of which reached No. 1 on the Billboard charts, the Disney+ doc is a goldmine of exhilarating concert footage, interview clips and photographs that reveal John both in high-energy performance mode and low-spirited solitude. Fans will eat it up. But the contemporary perspective of a parallel track in which he prepares to play a farewell show is anemic.
That 2022 concert at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles marked the end of John’s 50 years of touring in North America. It also represented a full-circle trajectory from his legendary 1975 show at the same venue in front of 110,000 people (sporting a Bob Mackie-designed sequined Dodgers uniform) as his global fame reached its zenith.
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Directors R.J. Cutler and Furnish build their portrait around audio tapes of a series of conversations with Alexis Petridis, a music critic at The Guardian, as John was preparing to pen his memoir. Petridis also served as ghostwriter on that 2019 publication, titled without false modesty, Me. Their chats, focusing on the performer’s 1970s heyday, are convivial sit-downs that go light on hard questions — at least in what we hear of them. John’s autobiography is distinguished by its candor, and its healthy balance of self-mockery and self-knowledge. If only more of that had carried over into the film.
Punctuating Never Too Late are stops in various North American cities on the “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour during the period leading up to the L.A. show. Bold pink text identifies each location and establishes a countdown of sorts: “9 Months to Dodger Stadium,” etc. But there’s no buildup, no sense of a momentous occasion looming.
Instead, we get some lovely stage snippets along with more private glimpses of John — warmly thanking his band; being a loving father on a video call to his two young sons back in England; recording his Rocket Hour radio show, on which he’s an avid cheerleader for emerging talent. The access seems carefully controlled, however, rarely revealing.
In the Petridis conversations and additional commentary by John, he outlines a life story that will be familiar to longtime fans from previous documentaries, specials, profile pieces, his autobiography and the 2019 biopic Rocketman, in which he was played by Taron Egerton.
That’s not to say there isn’t poignancy in the paradox of a global superstar, adored by millions but saddened by the emptiness inside him, as John puts it. He admits there was nothing in his life back in those supposed golden years but success and drugs, and later, an abusive relationship with John Reid, who became his manager and introduced him to cocaine.
But John has recounted this long, lonely path from addiction and yearning for emotional fulfillment to sobriety and eventually to love and family countless times before, and it feels like it, becoming evident in the thinness of his hindsight perspective. His disinterest in digging deep makes him a frustrating documentary subject.
He’s more voluble on his unhappy childhood, spending time in his own fantasy land while his abusive parents argued; on his virtuoso piano skills from a young age, gaining him attention where before he had felt invisible; on his discovery at the Royal Academy of Music that classical music wasn’t his thing.
Propelled by editors Greg Finton and Poppy Das’ zippy montage, with sharp use of split-screen and slick animated sequences, the film guides us through his early formation of a band that opened for the Drifters, the Temptations and Patti LaBelle. Around this time, he also changed his name from Reginald Dwight, intuiting that Reg could never amount to anything but Elton could.
The encounter with lyricist Bernie Taupin that would prove so foundational to John’s success came by chance when he fronted up for a record company interview and was waved off with a batch of Taupin’s lyrics. In one terrific TV interview clip, he sits at the piano with the hand-written lyrics for “Tiny Dancer,” explaining how certain key words like “ballerina” almost dictated the tempo and chords.
Removing any mystique from their long collaboration as songwriters and showing the ease with which the words flowed from the page to the piano keys makes their prolific output of classic tunes in those five years even more remarkable. And John’s thoughts on his friendship with Taupin are touching.
He proved equally proficient at crafting pop ballads and rock bangers. “Your Song,” “Crocodile Rock,” “Bennie and the Jets,” “Rocket Man,” “Daniel,” “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” “The Bitch Is Back,” “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” “Philadelphia Freedom”: the concentration of all-timers in such a short window is dizzying. Not to mention the bounty of deep cuts.
Often, his style veered into gospel, as in “Border Song,” or turned anthemic, like “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” or “Candle in the Wind.” The latter is heard in footage of the recording session, the first time John had played with an orchestra.
Tracing his showy honky-tonk piano style to the early influence of Winifred Atwell, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, John became an electrifying stage performer, often standing at the piano to play and springboarding off it like a gymnast. Though in clips from the show he credits with putting him on the map, a 1970 gig at L.A.’s Troubadour club with an audience of just 250 people, there are no stage tricks, just a singer-songwriter hunched over his keyboard making music that had critics grasping for superlatives.
I wish there has been more sections in which John lights up and seems fully engaged, as he is when recalling his friendship with John Lennon and their wild nights doing coke together, at one point hiding out in a hotel room like giggling kids while ignoring Andy Warhol at the door.
Lennon hadn’t been on a stage since the last Beatles concert in 1966 when John persuaded him to drop by as a special guest at a Thanksgiving 1974 Madison Square Garden show to perform the No. 1 hit “Whatever Gets You Through the Night,” on which they had collaborated. The roar of the crowd is understandable. John afterwards takes credit for getting Lennon and Yoko back together that evening after a split. It’s a delightful anecdote, though it’s a shame the movie skips over their earlier collaboration on John’s “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” cover.
What’s missing from all this is the expert contextualization that a music critic might have provided, someone to elaborate on the unique way that John bridged ‘60s pop with ‘70s rock. As terrific as the archival performance and interview clips are, they would have benefited from an occasional external voice, one that was more analytical than John’s recollections. A word or two from the brilliant musicians that collaborated with him during that period — in particular Nigel Olsson, Dee Murray and Davey Johnstone — wouldn’t have gone amiss either.
The doc sort of reduces an extraordinary run of creative fecundity to a threadbare narrative — working-class lad pumps out hits, develops a flamboyant stage persona and achieves worldwide success, dulling the emotional void in his life with booze, drugs and casual sex.
Shots of the fabulous, beyond-glamrock costumes in which he peacocked around the stage (I would kill for that lime-green three-piece sequined suit) also represent a missed opportunity. John says the outrageous get-ups were a reaction to everything he wasn’t allowed to do as a child. But a queer theorist might have dug into the way those costumes were an expression of the sexuality at that time still locked in the closet.
The film looks at the impact of a 1976 Rolling Stone cover story in which he got personal, coming halfway out by saying he wanted love but hadn’t met anyone of either sex with whom he’d want to settle down. John talks briefly about the negative reaction, with some conservative radio stations destroying his records, but also the freedom that even that incomplete unburdening gave him. Though it wasn’t freedom enough to live as an openly gay man.
When he married a woman in 1984, sound engineer Renate Blauer, a three-year union that goes unmentioned here, eyebrows shot up on anyone with even a semi-functioning gaydar. John was in the closet in much the same way Liberace and Barry Manilow were in the closet, which is to say not at all if you were paying attention. Nobody is saying being a queer elder statesman gives John the obligation in this doc to speak on LGBTQ rights, but it might have been insightful to hear how he views his own evolution in relation to the broader picture.
Back in the ‘70s, anxious record company execs were no doubt sweating over the potential hit to sales and airplay if one of their top-selling artists went public about being gay. Now, he’s married to a man and remains one of the most enduringly beloved figures in popular music, whose songs have brought joy for generations.
To the filmmakers’ credit, while the doc often seems to be building toward the hosanna moment in 1993 when John and Furnish got together, setting up the latter as savior to a lost soul, that doesn’t happen. Instead, their civil partnership in 2005 is covered almost perfunctorily, and no mention is made of their conversion of that contract into a marriage in 2014, when England legalized same-sex marriage.
Downplaying these life-changing events when Never Too Late has repeatedly pointed to the missing part in its subject’s life seems an odd choice, almost neutralizing the emotion.
It’s countered, however, by a series of beautiful moments in the 2022 Dodger Stadium show — first when John pours feeling into “Someone Saved My Life Tonight,” then when he brings out Taupin to take a bow, and finally when he proudly ushers his husband and sons onto the stage, introducing them as the reason he’s retiring, all four of them beaming.
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