During the years-long height of the British superstar Robbie Williams’s fame, I’d often wonder why he struggled to cross over to true global recognition. Williams, for those who are unfamiliar, started out as a member of the wildly beloved English boy band Take That in the early 1990s. After leaving the group in 1995, right when its success was cresting, Williams transformed himself from potential pop-culture footnote into icon. A slew of blockbuster albums made him a household name across the United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia—but not in the United States, where his early-2000s attempts to gain traction made little progress. Perhaps the country had too many of its own idols—or perhaps, as the new musical biopic Better Man argues, Williams was too gleefully self-deprecating to sincerely make the sales pitch.
The director Michael Gracey adheres to the biopic genre’s basic contours. Better Man follows Williams’s hardscrabble youth, his rise to fame, and the ups and downs that came with notoriety, all punctuated by interpretations of some of his most famous tracks. This synopsis suggests that the film is a programmatic, musician-approved project, almost as if it’s designed to be an entry point for a new generation of fans. Except, get this: Williams is represented as a CGI chimpanzee. Like, a walking, talking, human-size chimp, portrayed and voiced by a combination of a motion-capture actor (Jonnie Davies), a musician (Adam Tucker), and Williams himself.
Why is he a primate? Better Man doesn’t ever explain—though in its trailer, Williams mentions feeling “less evolved” than everyone else—and none of the characters ever remarks on it. Instead, the meaning of the conceit is left in the hands of the audience. This decision is a baffling swerve for a celebrity biopic, one that will probably keep it from becoming an out-and-out sensation. But Better Man deserves to be treated as more than a strange curio: Despite the seemingly run-of-the-mill premise and the contrivance of the protagonist, it properly delves into its subject’s erratic persona, using the musical segments to advance the story instead of as mandatory breaks in the action. The result is one of the most thoughtfully constructed movies about a musician I’ve seen in years.
A core part of Williams’s appeal has always been his cheekiness, as the Brits would put it. Yes, he’s a handsome fella who sings catchy hits. But even though his stock-in-trade is sincere love ballads and toe-tapping anthems about having fun, Williams exudes the sense that he’s never taking any of the glitz around him too seriously. His narration throughout Better Man poses a possible reason for his devil-may-care attitude: It’s a cover for what he refers to as the clinical depression that has dogged him over the course of his career, especially at its peak. What better way to underline that than by removing his image from the film entirely?
The appealing presentation of chimp-Williams is helped by the fact that Gracey started his career as a visual-effects artist—he knows his way around computer-generated characters. His prior directorial effort was The Greatest Showman, a more conventional movie musical that tried to package the complex and problematic life of P. T. Barnum as a family-friendly inspirational tale. It made little sense, but it became something of a box-office phenomenon on the backs of Hugh Jackman’s bravado and Gracey’s steady hand behind the camera.
Better Man has not only similarly earwormy tunes but also a far richer subject than Barnum. Williams is a showman too, but he’s a rawer, more relatable one; he’s always worn his personal deficiencies on his sleeve, even on the biggest stage. Gracey’s attentive care with Williams’s discography is especially striking. Williams’s career could easily have been shot as a straightforward jukebox musical, running down the track listing of his greatest-hits CDs while sprinkling in some run-of-the-mill backstory material. Instead, Gracey rearranges the chronology, finding numbers that thematically match the events of his protagonist’s life. Williams performs the power ballad “Feel,” the lead single from his fifth solo album, to illustrate his tough childhood. The director re-creates the singer’s famed 2001 live rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” for Better Man’s grand finale; instead of just plucking another of the singer’s own numbers, he chooses to evoke one of Williams’s biggest inspirations.
The film’s most jaw-dropping set piece is also perhaps its most timeline-flouting. After covering his difficult adolescence in the downtrodden industrial town of Stoke-on-Trent, Better Man turns to Williams’s early years in the music industry. Gracey captures the explosion of Take That’s crossover appeal—they climbed the ladder from small gay clubs to national arenas—in a scene where the band performs “Rock DJ,” Williams’s solo chart-topper from 2000. It unfolds as an unbroken, CGI-assisted camera move, with Williams and his bandmates—who, in real life, had nothing to do with the song—dancing through the streets of Central London, surrounded by a growing throng of fans. An artificial long take can sometimes come across as gimmicky, but it works tremendously well here, thanks in part to the creative choreography. Movie-musical directors must make certain decisions when mounting their big numbers: Should they throw everything into a wide shot, capturing the scale of the dance routines but making the world around them feel static? Or is it better to cut into the action constantly, highlighting the individual players but losing that sense of magnitude? The one-shot technique helpfully circumvents those questions.
Gracey makes an effort to innovate in several other ways, navigating around the musical genre’s visual conventions and limitations. A later scene, for example, renders the anthemic “Let Me Entertain You” as a dreamlike battle between Williams and his mouthiest chimp-demons. High points like these helped keep Better Man in my good graces even as the second half dips into excessively maudlin territory, as Williams wrestles with the strictures of fame. Still, some viewers might find the audacity of a hero that’s a CGI chimp impossible to overcome—especially those who know little about the real person (including what he actually looks like). Early box-office returns seem to indicate U.S. theatergoers’ disinterest, if not outright bafflement. But Williams has always thrived on the audience’s sympathy as much as their admiration, and Better Man finds a wonderfully goofy way to represent that with its charming, if unevolved, simian star.
The post The Singing Chimp Isn’t the Wildest Part of Better Man appeared first on The Atlantic.
