No one Makes a Monkey out of Robbie Williams… Except Robbie Williams (and a Large Crew of VFX Artists)
DIRECTED BY MICHAEL GRACEY/2025 (U.S. Wide Theatrical Release)
Choruses of people have sounded off on the formulaic stagnation of the musician biopic. Bohemian Rhapsody… Rocketman… Respect… Walk the Line… Ray… Squint at the lot of ‘em and they’re all the same.
Cut to now, as we engage in the annual wrap of the previous movie year… Yes, they’re still making musician biopics- but is it possible that 2024 has overcompensated in terms of veering away from samey-same syndrome? Pharrell became a Lego. Bob Dylan became Timothée Chalemet. And in the confoundingly dull Better Man (a 2024 would-be awards contender going wide in early 2025), Robbie Williams has become a chimpanzee.
Um….
Being largely in the dark about the career and music of the English singer and songwriter, it’s not asking too much of a two-hour-and-fourteen-minute film of his life story to be enlightening in this department. Better Man (ostensibly) makes good with the facts (fame came quick as a member of a boy band though he’d continue to grapple with his cabaret performing father’s sparse presence throughout his life…), and songs, but doesn’t change up the tried and maybe-true methodology of these stories. Not as it’d have you believe, anyway.
The obligatory approach in every contemporary biopic is to present the subject “warts and all”, something that Better Man has no problem doing. For more than half the film, Williams is toiling away in darkness and substance abuse- high and drunk and arrogant and insufferable. Lots of swearing, lots of dark, dank, yucky visuals. Accurate? Perhaps. Here though, “warts and all” seems extra stinky, since he’s a damn dirty ape.
While Better Man does make good with a few dazzling musical numbers set to the singer’s popular hits (likely the biggest reason why The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey is helming this), all of which incorporate pertinent fantasy in varying degrees, these moments are few and far between. The fact that Williams is seen as a chimpanzee (actually some sort of chimpanzee/human hybrid, as he has the head of the former but the stature and movement of the latter) proved to be another major layer of distancing for me, far beyond my lack of knowing his music. Why?? Because, we’re told via his persistent voiceover, that “This is how he sees himself.” Well, gee… Now, I guess, so will we. Flying in the face of the title “Better Man”, Williams is devolved on screen via motion capture. He’s performed by Jonno Davies and voiced by both Williams himself and Davies. Regular unaltered humans Steve Pemberton, Kate Mulvany, Alison Steadman, and Damon Herriman also star.
Not only does the WTF animalized nature of the bizarre conceit remove a needed tactile humanity from these proceedings (so much for any acting award consideration- usually a silver lining on even the blandest of biopics), I found myself continually distracted with monkey-related questions. Instead of being caught up in all the personal drama and music making, I was instead wondering things like, “Does he have a tail?”, “What do his feet look like?”, “Can he move through trees with speed and agility?”, and “Is poo flinging going to be part of this?”
One such distraction on the positive side is the way Williams’ chimpanzee muzzle (an altogether different mouth shape than a human’s) manages to convincingly mouth all the songs and dialogue. It’s a visual effects triumph that no doubt owes no small debt to the contemporary Planet of the Apes animation. But boy do Gracey and Williams commit to this simian syndrome. Down the road, every time a clip of this movie is shown for whatever reason- career retrospectives, performance montages, you name it- an explanation will have to be given as to why the main character is a chimpanzee.
In a showbiz career that’s yielded hit after hit, the dark and off-putting Better Man is likely to be a big-budget footnote and matte-haired oddity. Sure, Robbie Williams may’ve sold more albums in the UK than any other British solo artist in history, but that success is highly unlikely to follow him into the movies. In his own attempts to swing both ways, he’s finally made a monkey out of himself. If only Better Man were a better movie.