Broadcast in early March 2019, Leaving Neverland is not about Michael Jackson. It's not about Wade Robson. It's not about Jimmy Safechuck. It's about how paedophiles groom not just their victims, but their victims' families. It's about the complicated relationship that victims can form with their abusers. It's about the myriad of reasons that can conspire to prevent victims from coming forward. It's about how the effects of childhood sexual abuse linger into adulthood. Certainly, fans will argue that Jackson didn't have a childhood, that he himself was a victim of non-sexual abuse at the hands of his father, that he was an innocent who simply liked to make children happy. However, even his most fervent admirers have always found it difficult to rationalise the fact that this grown man chose to surround himself with prepubescent boys, with whom he would hold hands in public and share his bed in private. That's not normal, and no amount of blinkered rhetoric can render it so.
Undoubtedly, the documentary is unbalanced - no attempt was made to contact the Jackson estate, any of his family, or anyone who knew or worked for him, limiting itself instead to interviews with Robson, Safechuck, and their families. It also omits information concerning the ongoing lawsuits each has filed against the estate. Furthermore, it's aesthetically bland, with the majority of the runtime taken up with visually flat talking-head interviews filmed in standard mid-shots and close-ups. However, this is very much by design; director Dan Reed isn't concerned with bells and whistles or smoke and mirrors. This isn't a tabloid depiction of a salacious celebrity scandal - rather it has a troubling story to tell, an important point to make, a relevant theme to explore, and it wants to do so as unencumbered by the trappings of form as it can. It doesn't need to be as long as it is, and the lack of balance unquestionably leaves it open to criticism, but nevertheless, this is an exceptional examination of grooming and the psychological effects of abuse.
The film tells the similar but separate stories of Wade Robson and James Safechuck, each of whom met Jackson in 1987, when Wade was five and James was ten. Over the next few years, each boy became a frequent companion of Jackson, and, as they tell it, a victim of regular molestation. When Jackson was accused of molesting 13-year-old Jordan Chandler in 1993, Wade and James gave statements denying that Jackson had done anything inappropriate with them, whilst Wade, his sister Chantal, and his mother Joy all publicly defended Jackson. In 2005, Jackson was charged with seven counts of child molestation relating to 12-year-old Gavin Arvizo, and reached out to both Wade and James. However, whilst Wade and Chantal both agreed to act as witnesses for the defence, James refused, telling his mother Stephanie that Jackson had molested him. Wade would not reveal to his family that he had been molested until 2013.
Leaving Neverland is less concerned with the actual abuse (although time is certainly given over to that) than with the process of grooming and the psychological aftereffects. Culled from over 50 hours of interviews, the film runs just under 240 minutes, but, despite the runtime, the only interviewees are Wade, Joy, Chantal, Wade's brother Shane, his grandmother Lorraine Jean Cullen, and his wife Amanda, and James, Stephanie, and James's wife Laura. Reed did interview investigators from 1993 and 2005, but as he explains, "I realised that the families' telling of the story was so complete already. You feel like you are inside the family, and I felt that interviews from the public sphere would break that spell and place us back on the outside."
Aesthetically, the film is as plain as possible. Whereas Wade and James's accounts are graphic and difficult to hear, they're never sensationalised, with Reed allowing their words to speak for themselves - there's no cutaways to experts telling us what to think, no graphics or voice-overs, no montages to suture us into the timeframe. Indeed, at times, Reed's camera sits patiently as an interviewee formulates their thoughts - a kind of "dead air" that one doesn't find in most documentaries.
This tendency to leave the stories unadorned ties into the usage of such a small pool of interviewees - this is Wade and James's story, and anything or anyone which can't speak to that very specific rubric isn't featured. Something else Reed omits is any attempt to tie Jackson's behaviour back to his own abusive upbringing - the film makes no attempt to portray him as somehow less culpable because he didn't have a childhood. In fact, it makes no attempt to portray him at all. Again, this is Wade and James's story, and for better or worse, Reed concerns himself with nothing but that story and how the abuse rippled out through the two families.
Within that, it's as much about the complex, often contradictory relationships that victims can develop with their abusers as it is with the abuse itself. This speaks to why both Wade and James lied for so long - they weren't just lying to other people, they were lying to themselves. And ultimately, the film suggests that rather than being indicative of fabrication, such falsehoods are an understandable reaction to sustained abuse - the compulsion to keep the secret is an intrinsic element of that which is being kept secret, with Wade stating, "I want to be able to speak the truth as loud as I had to speak the lie for so long."
Of course, a major theme is the manipulative nature inherent to grooming. As Oprah Winfrey says in Oprah Winfrey Presents: After Neverland (2019), "this wasn't just sexual abuse, it was also sexual seduction." However, it was also non-sexual seduction of the families. This is especially important in relation to Joy and Stephanie, who allowed themselves to be talked into granting permission for a man they didn't really know to take their child into his bed, and who today are working as much to forgive themselves as they are to atone to their children.
However, as much as the film indicts the parents, so too does it indict society at large. Reed continuously cuts from the talking-head interviews to archival footage of young boys in Jackson's presence (as well as Wade and James, we see Macaulay Culkin and Brett Barnes). This allows Reed to wordlessly comment on the collective societal obliviousness and blind hero worship that allowed Jackson to publicly surround himself with children without anyone saying, "this is kinda weird". And just as people such as R. Kelly, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, and Bill O'Reilly got away with predatory behaviour, Jackson's celebrity was simply too big, dwarfing any sense of criminality; his star power was such that we dismissed what, in hindsight, was textbook grooming, as we put his fondness for prepubescent boys down to nothing more than his young-at-heart idiosyncrasy. Celebrity Trumps criminality (pun very much intended - after all, when Donald Trump literally admitted on tape he could sexually assault women with impunity and get away with it because he's famous, he was subsequently elected president).
Of course, there are problems, several of which I've already touched on. The imbalance for example. I understand why Reed confined his interviews to just Wade, James, and their families, but by doing so, he has opened himself and the film up to a not illegitimate form of attack. And because this makes the film easier to critique, it makes it easier to dismiss, and thus easier to ignore, which is pretty much the opposite of what you want to happen as a documentarian.
Another problem is that it doesn't need to be four-hours long. There are several lengthy narrative digressions that, although they help to flesh out the home lives of Wade and James, do very little to inform the allegations against Jackson. Reed also tends to overuse drone shots of LA, which act like paragraph breaks. It's an interesting idea, but there are far too many, becoming repetitive and, eventually, irritating. And then, of course, there are the omissions, which have proven to be a red flag to a bull for Jackson fans. For example, that Wade is suing the Jackson estate is mentioned once, very briefly, and never alluded to again. That James is also suing the estate is never mentioned.
In the end, the lack of balance is a significant problem, but not to the extent that it undermines the way Reed presents the accusations, the way he teases out the process of grooming, the way he unflinchingly presents the abuse itself, the way he comes to focus on the years after the abuse ended - the film's cumulative effect is startlingly raw and generally persuasive. It looks at the process by which Jackson manoeuvred himself into a position to abuse the boys as much as at the abuse itself and at the psychological effects of telling the lie for so long as much as at the lie itself. In this sense, this is a hugely valuable document, not necessarily in terms of the specifics of Wade and James's stories, but in relation to the broader issues of child sexual abuse, and the misconceptions that permeate the zeitgeist.
Undoubtedly, the documentary is unbalanced - no attempt was made to contact the Jackson estate, any of his family, or anyone who knew or worked for him, limiting itself instead to interviews with Robson, Safechuck, and their families. It also omits information concerning the ongoing lawsuits each has filed against the estate. Furthermore, it's aesthetically bland, with the majority of the runtime taken up with visually flat talking-head interviews filmed in standard mid-shots and close-ups. However, this is very much by design; director Dan Reed isn't concerned with bells and whistles or smoke and mirrors. This isn't a tabloid depiction of a salacious celebrity scandal - rather it has a troubling story to tell, an important point to make, a relevant theme to explore, and it wants to do so as unencumbered by the trappings of form as it can. It doesn't need to be as long as it is, and the lack of balance unquestionably leaves it open to criticism, but nevertheless, this is an exceptional examination of grooming and the psychological effects of abuse.
The film tells the similar but separate stories of Wade Robson and James Safechuck, each of whom met Jackson in 1987, when Wade was five and James was ten. Over the next few years, each boy became a frequent companion of Jackson, and, as they tell it, a victim of regular molestation. When Jackson was accused of molesting 13-year-old Jordan Chandler in 1993, Wade and James gave statements denying that Jackson had done anything inappropriate with them, whilst Wade, his sister Chantal, and his mother Joy all publicly defended Jackson. In 2005, Jackson was charged with seven counts of child molestation relating to 12-year-old Gavin Arvizo, and reached out to both Wade and James. However, whilst Wade and Chantal both agreed to act as witnesses for the defence, James refused, telling his mother Stephanie that Jackson had molested him. Wade would not reveal to his family that he had been molested until 2013.
Leaving Neverland is less concerned with the actual abuse (although time is certainly given over to that) than with the process of grooming and the psychological aftereffects. Culled from over 50 hours of interviews, the film runs just under 240 minutes, but, despite the runtime, the only interviewees are Wade, Joy, Chantal, Wade's brother Shane, his grandmother Lorraine Jean Cullen, and his wife Amanda, and James, Stephanie, and James's wife Laura. Reed did interview investigators from 1993 and 2005, but as he explains, "I realised that the families' telling of the story was so complete already. You feel like you are inside the family, and I felt that interviews from the public sphere would break that spell and place us back on the outside."
Aesthetically, the film is as plain as possible. Whereas Wade and James's accounts are graphic and difficult to hear, they're never sensationalised, with Reed allowing their words to speak for themselves - there's no cutaways to experts telling us what to think, no graphics or voice-overs, no montages to suture us into the timeframe. Indeed, at times, Reed's camera sits patiently as an interviewee formulates their thoughts - a kind of "dead air" that one doesn't find in most documentaries.
This tendency to leave the stories unadorned ties into the usage of such a small pool of interviewees - this is Wade and James's story, and anything or anyone which can't speak to that very specific rubric isn't featured. Something else Reed omits is any attempt to tie Jackson's behaviour back to his own abusive upbringing - the film makes no attempt to portray him as somehow less culpable because he didn't have a childhood. In fact, it makes no attempt to portray him at all. Again, this is Wade and James's story, and for better or worse, Reed concerns himself with nothing but that story and how the abuse rippled out through the two families.
Within that, it's as much about the complex, often contradictory relationships that victims can develop with their abusers as it is with the abuse itself. This speaks to why both Wade and James lied for so long - they weren't just lying to other people, they were lying to themselves. And ultimately, the film suggests that rather than being indicative of fabrication, such falsehoods are an understandable reaction to sustained abuse - the compulsion to keep the secret is an intrinsic element of that which is being kept secret, with Wade stating, "I want to be able to speak the truth as loud as I had to speak the lie for so long."
Of course, a major theme is the manipulative nature inherent to grooming. As Oprah Winfrey says in Oprah Winfrey Presents: After Neverland (2019), "this wasn't just sexual abuse, it was also sexual seduction." However, it was also non-sexual seduction of the families. This is especially important in relation to Joy and Stephanie, who allowed themselves to be talked into granting permission for a man they didn't really know to take their child into his bed, and who today are working as much to forgive themselves as they are to atone to their children.
However, as much as the film indicts the parents, so too does it indict society at large. Reed continuously cuts from the talking-head interviews to archival footage of young boys in Jackson's presence (as well as Wade and James, we see Macaulay Culkin and Brett Barnes). This allows Reed to wordlessly comment on the collective societal obliviousness and blind hero worship that allowed Jackson to publicly surround himself with children without anyone saying, "this is kinda weird". And just as people such as R. Kelly, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, and Bill O'Reilly got away with predatory behaviour, Jackson's celebrity was simply too big, dwarfing any sense of criminality; his star power was such that we dismissed what, in hindsight, was textbook grooming, as we put his fondness for prepubescent boys down to nothing more than his young-at-heart idiosyncrasy. Celebrity Trumps criminality (pun very much intended - after all, when Donald Trump literally admitted on tape he could sexually assault women with impunity and get away with it because he's famous, he was subsequently elected president).
Of course, there are problems, several of which I've already touched on. The imbalance for example. I understand why Reed confined his interviews to just Wade, James, and their families, but by doing so, he has opened himself and the film up to a not illegitimate form of attack. And because this makes the film easier to critique, it makes it easier to dismiss, and thus easier to ignore, which is pretty much the opposite of what you want to happen as a documentarian.
Another problem is that it doesn't need to be four-hours long. There are several lengthy narrative digressions that, although they help to flesh out the home lives of Wade and James, do very little to inform the allegations against Jackson. Reed also tends to overuse drone shots of LA, which act like paragraph breaks. It's an interesting idea, but there are far too many, becoming repetitive and, eventually, irritating. And then, of course, there are the omissions, which have proven to be a red flag to a bull for Jackson fans. For example, that Wade is suing the Jackson estate is mentioned once, very briefly, and never alluded to again. That James is also suing the estate is never mentioned.
In the end, the lack of balance is a significant problem, but not to the extent that it undermines the way Reed presents the accusations, the way he teases out the process of grooming, the way he unflinchingly presents the abuse itself, the way he comes to focus on the years after the abuse ended - the film's cumulative effect is startlingly raw and generally persuasive. It looks at the process by which Jackson manoeuvred himself into a position to abuse the boys as much as at the abuse itself and at the psychological effects of telling the lie for so long as much as at the lie itself. In this sense, this is a hugely valuable document, not necessarily in terms of the specifics of Wade and James's stories, but in relation to the broader issues of child sexual abuse, and the misconceptions that permeate the zeitgeist.