Despite a pair of Golden Globe nominations, “Music” has had about as bad a launch as a movie can get.
Not only does Sia’s directorial debut, which began streaming Friday, have a 12% percent on Rotten Tomatoes, the film has been condemned by autism experts and is the target of a Change.org campaign attempting to have its Golden Globe nominations — Best Musical/Comedy Picture and Best Musical/Comedy Actress for Kate Hudson — revoked.
As for Maddie Ziegler, who plays the title character, she seems to have moved on. The 18-year-old star from Murrysville, Pennsylvania, who came to fame on “Dance Moms,” hasn’t commented on “Music’s” many controversies and made no mention of it on social media when it came out last week.
Instead, Ziegler went on Instagram on Feb. 10, two days before the release of “Music,” to promote “The Fallout,” a teen drama she’s starring in that is premiering at the SXSW Film Festival in March.
In “Music,” Ziegler plays a nonverbal autistic teenager who comes under the care of her half-sister, played by Kate Hudson, after the death of her grandmother. Carnegie Mellon grad and “Hamilton” Tony winner Leslie Odom Jr. plays a sympathetic neighbor.
When the trailer was released in November, Sia, who described the film as a “love letter to the autism community,” faced immediate backlash for not casting an autistic actor in the title role.
Petitions sprung up on change.org to stop the release of the film. The new petition to have the nominations rescinded, which has more than 70,000 signatures, states that “Sia's debut movie ‘Music’ is severely ableist and contributes to harmful stereotypes of autistic people.”
It notes that the music segments, with strobes, loud sounds and quick camera movements, could cause seizures for autistic people, one-fourth of whom have epilepsy.
It takes particular issue with Ziegler’s performance.
“How does one act autistic, you may ask. If we look at Ziegler's portrayal, the answer is by stereotypically mimicking autistic people the exact same way autistic people have been bullied and mocked their entire lives. It also enforces the idea that autistic people are not good enough and that their autism is better portrayed by someone with no concept of what it is to be autistic. To make things even worse, Ziegler learned how to ‘act autistic’ by watching videos of autistic children having meltdowns uploaded to YouTube by their parents without their consent.”
The movie is also under fire for depicting the teenager being restrained as a way to calm her down, a practice that has been condemned.
"The autistic community has been fighting for decades to end the use of restraints that traumatize and kill," Zoe Gross, director of advocacy at the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said in a statement. "Had the filmmakers chosen to meaningfully involve autistic people from the beginning, we could have told them how catastrophically irresponsible it is to encourage viewers to use the kind of deadly restraints that killed Max Benson, Eric Parsa, and many other members of our community."
Before deleting her Twitter, Sia, who was angry and defiant during the initial backlash in November, tweeted out “I’m sorry” on Feb. 4 and agreed to add this disclaimer to the film:
“MUSIC in no way condones or recommends the use of restraint on autistic people. There are autistic occupational therapists that specialize in sensory processing who can be consulted to explain safe ways to provide proprioceptive, deep-pressure feedback to help [with] meltdown safety.”
One of the most important reviews of “Music” came from The Autisticats, an Instagram account run by a group of young people with autism.
“Eden” writes, “I also want to emphasize that, while I mention Ziegler frequently in this post because she is the actress portraying the autistic character, this whole fiasco is not her fault. She was only 14 at the time that filming began. The blame lies with Sia and the other members of this project who did not stop this before it got out of hand.”
Along with “Fallout,” Ziegler will also star, as Velma, in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” which was shot in New York and New Jersey in the summer of 2019, and was bumped from December 2020 to December 2021.
