Review: Better Man — Movies for the Rest of Us with Bill Newcott

Better Man

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Rating: R

Run Time: 2 hours 14 minutes

Stars: Robbie Williams, Jonno Davies, Steve Pemberton, Alison Steadman

Writers: Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole, Michael Gracey

Motion Capture Assistant Director: Emma Cross

Director: Michael Gracey

Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival

 

Sometimes you just wish you had been in the room when certain elements of a film’s creative vision were decided. For example, I would have given a good amount of money to be a fly on the wall when it was settled that the actor playing Robbie Williams in Better Man, a film biography of the British singer, would not be an actor at all, but a CGI-created chimpanzee. And that all the other characters would be played by living, breathing human beings.

The reasoning being, it seems, that no mere human could ever fill the role of a living legend, a show biz behemoth, a Mount Rushmore-class idol like Robbie Williams, a performer who I had somehow managed never to see or hear in a lifetime of entertainment writing.

My ignorance, of course, is not Robbie’s fault — it’s because I was born and raised in the U.S., where the British variety show Top of the Pops, a frequent Williams showcase, was emphatically not on TV for more than 40 years. The chimp decision, however, is clearly all Robbie’s: Early on, his voiceover narration explains that he wants us to see him as he’s always seen himself, which is apparently in the form of a singing simian.

If you’re willing to just go with it, you’re way more than halfway to enjoying Better Man.

I suspect the reverse anthropomorphizing of Williams is aimed, at least in part, to disguise the fact that the story trajectory here is boilerplate Rock Star Biopic: humble beginnings, hunger for success, early hits, the love of a good woman, then a descent into drugs and booze that costs him his lifelong love and very nearly ruins him professionally, before a miraculous dawn of realization engenders a bigger-than-ever resurgence.

From Rocket Man to Bohemian Rhapsody to Ray to Amadeus, the self-destructive musical genius gambit has been played countless times. But the self-destructive musical genius portrayed as a chimpanzee? Well, now you’re onto something, sort of.

Williams gives voice to the grown-up Robbie, while actor Jonno Davies provides the physical performance that motion capture assistant director Emma Cross (who did two Planet of the Apes movies, natch) has converted into the human-like actions of a chimp.

On paper that sounds like a hard sell, and I suppose the bulk of credit for making it work as well as it does should go to the film’s costars, who somehow convince the audience there is nothing at all unusual about Robbie’s chimpy-ness. Steve Pemberton is fun as Robbie’s ambitious yet hopelessly irresponsible father, a struggling nightclub singer who — while everyone else in working class Stoke-on-Trent is obsessed with Duran Duran and Frankie Goes to Hollywood — insists that his talented son polish his pipes to the sound of Frank Sinatra.

Remarkably, the strategy pays off as Robbie lands a spot in Take That, which to this day remains the single most successful boy band in British history (I’d never heard of them, either). The future is bright, but Robbie, haunted by his childhood insecurities, proves to be an impossibly self-destructive collaborator and is thrown out of the group.

Great sadness ensues for Robbie, along with drug addiction and alienation from everyone who loves him. But while Robbie is at rock-bottom, his career is not: In fact, it is during a concert before 150,000 fans (in mid-performance he hallucinates grisly images of doing battle with himself) that Robbie comes to the realization he can’t go on like this.

And so, bing-bang-boom, Robbie gets clean, reconciles with the people he’s hurt, and unites with his estranged father onstage at Royal Albert Hall for a tearful rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”

Oh, dear — I seem to have given away the whole story here, haven’t I? But I don’t feel badly about it, because the trajectory of Better Man is as predictable as a 1980s sitcom, and since Robbie is here telling us his own story in a big-budget Hollywood movie, we know full well he’s not going to swirl down the tubes without a trace.

The fact is, Better Man is the movie equivalent of a theme park ride — we meander through the setup, climb that first hill of success, then experience the thrills and scares of the downward plunge before rolling back into the loading area, safe and sound, just as we always knew we would.

And our guide is a computerized chimp! I suspect there’s a Universal Studios Orlando ride on the drawing board right now.

It’s not for nothing that director/co-writer Michael Gracey has largely distinguished himself as a music video creator. His only previous feature, The Greatest Showman, was a splashy musical that either charmed audiences or sent them scrambling for the exits.

Better Man will, I suspect, be similarly polarizing. The songs aren’t bad (I guess they’re all million-plus sellers) and the chimp is kind of fun, in an outrageous, go-for-broke way.

And now I know who Robbie Williams is. Mission accomplished!