Miley Cyrus has made a 'pop opera' film to accompany her 9th album, Something Beautiful

Australia Broadcast Center

3 days ago

Miley Cyrus has one of the best voices in contemporary pop. And in 2023, she showed it off with signature, inescapable hit 'Flowers', a break-up survival anthem perfectly suited to her voice's lived-in smokiness.
What: Miley Cyrus's "pop opera" visual album for her excellent ninth release.
Starring: Miley Cyrus
Directed by: Miley Cyrus, Jacob Bixenham, Brendan Walter
Where: In cinemas June 27, one night only
Likely to make you feel: Like the term "pop opera" is a stretch
But the reason for that wonderful texture and grit is also why the former Disney star isn't taking a victory lap tour of her 9th album, Something Beautiful, released this June to some of the most glowing reviews of her career.
The 32-year-old has Reinke's edema, a swelling of her vocal cords that has given her a large polyp, producing the gritty texture to her voice. Surgery could ruin her voice entirely.
As she recently told Apple Music interviewer Zane Lowe, the condition most affects performing, making it "like running a marathon with ankle weights on", which is why her last global tour was more than a decade ago.
Instead of touring, Cyrus has created a cinema-exclusive (for now) "pop opera" and visual album for Something Beautiful, screening for one night only across Australia this Friday.
She describes the hour-long film as a conceptual album about healing, telling Harper's Bazaar it was like Pink Floyd's The Wall "but with a better wardrobe and more glamorous, and filled with pop culture".
A large-scale statement like a visual album offers an interesting artistic opportunity for Cyrus, a fascinating figure who hasn't necessarily found a creative through line to match her natural charisma, perhaps more concerned with wrestling off her Disney star beginnings as Hannah Montana.
Fifteen years on from hanging up Hannah's golden wig, Cyrus has certainly created distance, most pointedly with the boisterous, hyper-sexual R&B rebellion of 2013's Bangerz, which generated plenty of controversy.
In recent years, she's largely settled on a series of more mature pop albums tinged with different genres, including country (2017's Younger Now), glam rock (2020's Plastic Hearts) and light synth-pop (2023's Endless Summer Vacation).
Sonically, Something Beautiful is a coalescence of those recent albums — a mixture of prog-rock, soul, jazz, disco and R&B united by a grand air and a timeless feel, with lots of belting and big, cinematic sounds.
It's everything a pop album should offer, with break-up ballads ('More To Lose'), love songs ('End of the World'), empowerment anthems ('Walk of Fame') and campy disco diva moments ('Every Girl You've Ever Loved', featuring spoken word from Naomi Campbell).
The healing concept doesn't exactly come through the music, though — unlike Lady Gaga's similarly themed 2020 album Chromatica, there's no clear lyrical through line or leitmotifs. This has led fans — and critics — to assume that the visuals, arriving weeks after the album, would tie things together.
Unfortunately, there's next to no narrative to Something Beautiful, an hour-long set of music videos that neither hone nor expand the album's world in the way that "visual album" has come to signify after Beyoncé changed the game with that digital drop.
Directed by Cyrus with longtime collaborators Jacob Bixenman and Brendan Walter, the film starts strong but sidesteps much depth.
Running through the album in order, it opens with a series of ethereal shots set to Prelude, where Cyrus approximates Laurie Anderson's spoken word ("Arching to be seen/Aching to become real") over glitching synths.
We see a flower twisting, shadows and smoke, close-ups of Cyrus's body enclosed in crystal strands like a spider web as she wears the archival Thierry Mugler look from the album cover. Eerie, creepy, interesting.
It leads into the title track music video already available online, where Cyrus performs with a band on a smoky sound stage while in a custom feathery green snood by Mugler. Any sense of old-school, jazzy glamour is disrupted by the dual explosion of set lights and prog-rock in its chorus.
The premise of pristine beauty is muddied in favour of something grittier, more dangerous by these videos — an idea quickly abandoned. Instead, for most of Something Beautiful, we see Cyrus strut, lip-sync and play showgirl on various sound stages, donning extravagant archival looks by Mugler, as well as Bob Mackie and Jean Paul Gaultier.
Halfway-point track 'Easy Lover' sees Cyrus walk through the Paramount lot between sets in a tracking shot, highlighting the artificiality of what we see as she moves from make-up to an elaborate set with dancers, always performing for us.
There's a charm to sitting with these songs and letting them wash over us, but Something Beautiful lacks the imagination to add much beyond pretty visuals, seeming more like the interstitial videos between numbers at a concert than a stand-in for a concert itself.
While that might be expecting too much, the film debuted at Tribeca and is being touted as a cinematic event, but the closest Something Beautiful gets to The Wall is a creative block.
It's a missed opportunity, whether limited by budget constraints or a lack of imagination.
Compare it to Jennifer Lopez's completely over-the-top visual album from last year, This Is Me: Now… A Love Story, which was self-funded for $US20 million. A meta-narrative about Lopez and Ben Affleck's tumultuous love affair, it's also a convoluted sci-fi narrative featuring endless celebrity cameos and a steampunk heart factory at risk of explosion.
Cyrus didn't need to go full Lopez (nor should she), but at least This Is Me was ambitious, guided by a frenetic sense that Lopez needed to express whatever that film was.
Without that drive, Something Beautiful lacks energy: even if it is visually beautiful, anyone but devout fans will find themselves wishing for something more.
Miley Cyrus: Something Beautiful is in cinemas for one night only on Friday June 27.