Robbie Williams did not actually mean that he’s a circus monkey but responded in jest to a reporter’s question about how he feels on stage. In fact, it is how the director of The Greatest Showman, Michael Gracey, sees the situation in the musical biopic Better Man, which is a bit crazy especially since it would have been just dull if an actor was portraying Robbie Williams as it would have looked normal considering everything else.
Gracey leads viewers from one milestone to another in Williams’ biography, from his participation in Take That’s group to the singer’s record-breaking concert in Knebworth, but instead of a popstar, he uses a CG chimp to represent the Britpop icon. In a way, that gimmick works and gives the project a different flavor as makes it breath in a unique way. An entertaining portrayal of a boy band back singer turned global pop icon across four one-hour episodes will be found by fawning fans in the documentary Robbie Williams on Netflix. However, for those who wish to see a monkey snorting cocaine with the Oasis band, or see a significant hand job scene in front of manager Nigel Martin Smith played by Damon Herriman, let this movie be the one for you.
Where most people go to rush headlong into that blasted sacrilege of the “Who’s gonna play him?” question, the director managed to duck through the firestorm of controversy everyone has on the biopics of Jackie Wilson so what if Gracey has inserted what appears to be the new and revamped version of the Planet of the Apes franchise characters including Caesar. But for those who did, Against the Wires is remarkable in that more than twenty-five years have passed and man asks himself the question: would the entire have seemed out of place? Remember how absolutely ridiculous it was to pretend that Elton John would look anything like Taron Egerton in his career, and if a couple of false teeth can make Rami Malek into Freddie Mercury.
The mainstream audience outside the scrutiny of the entertainer looks to Christopher, Romeo, or Elvis threw very serious inconsistencies between us and the craftsmanship of the previous works including the pictures of their characters. In any event, that’s exactly the territory Better Man operates in, and for once, this is a blessing. In the first instance, Williams is really unknown to the Americans, thanks to which Gracey does not care what to mold out in the audience. And what’s even more impressive is that for once, his animated counterpart actually looks better and more expressive than half of normal actors in Hollywood so by default any animated character delivers a good performance.
Better Man goes the extra mile as the musical genius presents the most absurdly difficult technical feats to his collection, such as the stunning number ‘Rock DJ’ that was performed on the busy London’s Regent Street, filmed over four days and edited to create the illusion of a single long shot or the ‘Come Undone’ segment where he zooms off from boyband reunion waiting to be rehearsed to nearly crashing the car in an oncoming bus and going underwater with a swarm of paps. All these numbers convey pivotal communicative loads in impressions that are unimaginably dynamic, thus far leaving conventional tuners in the dust.
However, the portrayal in the song videos is more or less the same as the majority of pop star biographies Instead of selecting the proudest moment from their lives, most of such movies tell the life story of their subject from birth, through many years of family life, and sometimes even a return to the life of recovery. It works with docs, but for dramatic reconstructions, it confines arguably the coolest people into the predictable trajectory of growing up They start off showing nascent potential, get picked up, make loads of money, and gain fame only to destroy it all through substance abuse, promiscuity, and sheer self-importance. And if they are fortunate, they can die without an overdose which guarantees normal folks all over the world that it is far better not to be on camera.
In “Better Man”, the author seeks to be “All That Jazz,” but just succeeds in falling back on the rags to riches life-story template. And then we cut with a well-timed voiceover to teenage Robbie, who in trying out for the part of a chimp looks like a weaker (and much furrier) version of the other kids. Little Robbie’s a terrible athlete, and a poor student, but a great natural joker as he finds out during a school play. That comes from his father who is a comedian in cabaret (coincidentally called Peter Conway, played in this by Steve Pemberton) and leaves home at a young age when Robbie was still a wee child in order to follow his dreams in show business.
All this chaos has a deeper story of a helpless man-child striving for paternal affection, Williams tends to make sense. Reinventing his life drama first, Gracey caused the superstar to narrate his life, and then he told the desired story with co-writers Simon Gleeson and Oliver Cole. He has a vision that a lot of people find too irritating as their hypotheses about how he and his co-writers love to block out many twists on popular themes but they manage to pull it off, in exciting ways we are talking about Gracey’s artistry because it is absolutely like they talk about her like a medium-level magician.
Imagine a situation wherein Williams approaches his biggest gig only to find out that his staunchest supporter has passed away. The video begins with a close-up of Robbie’s eyes and slowly pans out and flips 180 degrees as Robbie moves upstage and twists upside down while David fans out above a thousand people in the audience. That moment as in all moments his eyes are what it’s about. Those green dazzling eyes with a human touch rather than a chimp look. All credit to the team (comprising Luke Millar, and others like Andy Taylor) there were many angles and they brought into three dimensions every glare and blinking sink for when to Robbie every defined expression could be.
Never one to censor himself, Williams has no qualms about swearing and engaging in expletive-filled behavior a cheeky characteristic that Gracey playfully tries to replicate here by photographing the chimp in strange settings. There’s also a music video like ‘Rock DJ’ where Williams feels bare after taking off all of his clothes. The central character’s alter ego, an ape, displays a strikingly wide range of feelings throughout the film, including love for another pop performer Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) only to see him later lose her when she chooses a number one single over their child. His bisexuality goes through such transitions that it makes the feature ‘Better Man’ far superior to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. This also includes his violent clinical depression although the final battle of them all (which seems to be a version of the ‘War for the Planet of the Apes’) crosses the line over his self-destructive path.
As dark as Williams gets, his charm does not go amiss and if anything, the monkey thing amps it up. Honestly speaking, Gracey’s mocking of the use of a chimp as a gimmick was already far-fetched because the ‘performing monkey’ drug only holds water when Williams is taking orders from someone else. There is a real actor, Jonno Davies, under the abominable CG ape, who handled his most difficult moments on the set, including quite a lot of Ashley Wallen’s choreography. It is difficult to estimate how much of Davies’ footage, if any, has been saved, the touch-up animation is of such high quality that the Academy will need to look for an appropriate category to award this care.
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