Better Man

Review: Giddy, imaginative ‘Better Man’ is the next evolution of the music biopic By Amy Nicholson - Film Critic Dec. 24, 2024 3 AM PT The pop star Robbie Williams is leagues more famous in his homeland of England than here in the States, American tastemakers having capriciously chosen to ignore his chart-topping ’90s boy band Take That and megawatt solo career. Go see his biopic anyway. All you need to know heading into “Better Man” is that Williams considers himself a performing monkey. Some screenings even have a pretaped introduction where he tells you so himself. The wildly creative director Michael Gracey (“The Greatest Showman”) fills you in on the rest with hilarious, no-holds-barred zeal: the drugs, the tabloid love affairs, the insecurity that made Williams desperate to be famous — a need to entertain that rewarded him with 14 No. 1 albums on the UK charts and a Guinness world record for selling 1.6 million concert tickets in 24 hours, as well as exhaustion and rehab. Through it all, the infamous party animal is played by a CGI chimpanzee. As Williams the monkey admits to his support group, “I’m unevolved.” Willams produces and narrates the film and seems to have given the screenwriters Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole and Gracey the go-ahead to rip him to shreds. Some superstars hide their megalomania under humility; Williams shields his tenderness with jokes about being a narcissist, only exposing his wounds in his muscular, vulnerable lyrics. He insults himself in the first minute of the movie, and from then on wears his humiliations like a Purple Heart pinned to his hairy, simian chest. Advertisement It’s conceivable that the guy who titled his best-of album “The Ego has Landed” approved the chimpanzee gimmick because he simply couldn’t bear the idea of a casting director discovering a younger version of Robbie Williams. And it’s easy to accept the conceit. Both chimps and pop stars are prone to destroying furniture and grinning while ripping off your face. Even physically, Williams shares an ape’s frank gaze and defiant chin. He charges instinctively after what he wants, chiefly a crowd so deafening he can’t hear his own self-loathing. Here, Williams acknowledges his struggles with depression. But his goal is the same as ever: Entertain at all costs. That’s been his modus operandi — a defense mechanism, really — since he was a 16-year-old, terrified that he was the least-talented and most-replaceable member of Take That, the biggest teenybopper pop act in Britain at the time. By moxie alone, he became Take That’s fan favorite, the cheeky one who would do anything for applause. Baring his bum on TV, Williams is the embodiment of the phrase “charm offensive.” Yes, there are the beats you expect in a musician’s biopic: the scene where he quits the band, the song lyrics scribbled after a tragedy, the wrenching quest for validation from his absent father, Peter (Steve Pemberton, fantastic). If you could tear your eyes away from the screen enough to check a stopwatch, not one minute goes by without a flourish that’s either funny, ridiculous, stunning or emotional. Sometimes, they’re all at once, like when young Williams (played by Carter J. Murphy), mimics his dad, a two-bit club performer, as they sing along with Frank Sinatra on television. The moment is at once a lens into a power dynamic that will run the length of the film, and a send-up of monkey see, monkey do. Jonno Davies is the ape performer under the Wētā FX motion capture and he’s terrific, as is the ensemble who acts against him with spectacular conviction. His Williams is always in motion: winking, gyrating, climbing in people’s laps. Millions of people watched the awards shows where Williams waggled his hips at Tom Jones, or challenged Oasis’ Liam Gallagher to a fist fight — moments that have been absorbed into pop culture. Williams was loose and free and likely blitzed out of his mind. Davies, however, nails it sober. It’s unclear how much of the dance choreography Davies is doing under those pixels. He’s a proper theater actor who came to renown playing Alex in an onstage production of “A Clockwork Orange.” There’s a rousing musical sequence where the Take That lads rampage through the West End and, at the song’s peak, Williams leaps from the top of a double-decker red bus. Like everything in the movie, this heavily digitized fabulosity is all vibes — the gleeful mayhem of being rich and famous and 20 years old. The other four actors in the scene playing the human members of the band are fully exposed and great at both dancing and self-mockery. Jake Simmance, as songwriter Gary Barlow, gets one of the film’s biggest laughs. Incensed that Williams is falling down drunk at a stadium show, his Barlow flounces up in a thong to hiss, “You’re making us look like fools out there!” The script toys with our awareness that pretty much everyone Williams feuded with is still alive — even his dad — and some, including Nigel Martin-Smith, the founder of Take That, have proven to be litigious. Fittingly, the humor bobs and weaves, setting up punchlines only to pivot to a zinger. Nigel, Williams says, is “an absolute sweetheart.” Cue a pause long enough to make you wonder if he’ll leave it there or drop the hammer. (He drops it, over and over.) For a bonus dig at the dawn of the grunge era, the hair and makeup team give Nigel (Damon Herriman) an icky, trendy chin-strap goatee. As for Williams’ fans, they’re seen as equal parts thrilling and terrifying. After he leaves Take That in 1995, suicide hotlines are flooded with calls from sobbing girls. Here, during a nightmarish underwater rendition of his ballad “Come Undone,” those teenagers swirl around him like frenzied chum, their slashed wrists trailing blood as they threaten to sink him, too. The only thing scarier would be going ignored, a dilemma Williams satirized in his 2000 music video “Rock DJ” which, if you weren’t scarred by it at the time, climaxes with Williams impressing a room of women by cheerfully peeling off his own skin and pelting the crowd with chunks of his raw flesh. Audiences who know his hits will see them gorgeously recontextualized as needed to suit his life story — the chronology of his singles doesn’t matter at all. In these mini-music videos, Gracey and his five-person editing team merge the present and future to cover as much ground as they can. The standout is the love song “She’s the One,” which starts with Williams meeting his early girlfriend, All Saints’ Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), on a yacht. As the fledgling couple whirls into a ballet, the number flashes forward to show the heartbreak ahead, and then cuts back again so that we feel the sting of all that wasted promise. There’s no need for the movie to look this good. Erik A. Wilson’s cinematography is warm and grainy; it and the script have been polished until the scene transitions flow like vodka down a frat party’s ice luge. Gracey gets an astonishing amount across in the details: the goofy creak of a leather jumpsuit, a camera angle tilted to show the utterly unspectacular pulley system that yanked Williams upside-down in front of a crowd of 125,000. The production designers are always pulling the rug out from under us. As soon as Williams ascends to a new height of fame, it begins to look tatty. There’s always someplace cooler he’s got to get to next. Yet, even as the movie captures Williams’ recklessness, it’s also a convincing sketch of his artistic growth and commitment. We catch on that he’s a genuine songwriter before he does. There’s a moment where his new manager (Anthony Hayes) warns Williams that success will drain him of everything he’s got, and then the film launches into an exhausting montage of cocaine and crowds and puke that proves him right. So it says something about American hardheadedness that we’ve resisted learning about Robbie Williams for the last 35 years. We’re as stubborn as he is. But go to the movie anyway. Within two hours, you’ll be so caught up in his charismatic maelstrom that when one chimpanzee tearfully stabs a baby chimpanzee on a confetti-ed battlefield, that you’ll think, yes Robbie, I totally understand where you’re coming from. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/...-biopic-profile

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Better Man review – Robbie Williams becomes CGI chimp in surreal biopic A candid look at the toxic force of envy that drove his musical career but turned a talented musician into a deeply unhappy man. But why the CGI? Robbie Williams – only he is a chimp! This is a pretty trad music biopic, coming with the accepted U-shaped narrative arc of humble beginnings, big break, superstardom, drugs, drink, shallow sex, dark-night-of-the-soul slump and redemptive comeback, here topped off with an unendurably protracted performance of My Way at the Royal Albert Hall in London. But the whole thing is given a cheeky high-concept twist by portraying the singer as an ape – a shrieking, scowling, capering CGI chimp – while all around are humans. Actor Jonno Davies plays the part in motion capture and Williams himself supplies the voiceover. The idea supposedly comes from Williams’s fear that he is immature and unevolved, stranded emotionally for ever at the age he became famous: 15. And this chimp figure runs counter to his 2001 song Better Man, with its poignant, maybe Darwinian yearning for improvement: “As my soul heals the shame/I will grow through this pain/Lord, I’m doing all I can/To be a better man.” But, of course, it is an outrageous existential humblebrag – as a chimp, Robbie is superior to the boring humanoids: funnier, crazier, braver and more charismatic. Steve Pemberton plays Robbie’s unreliable old dad, Peter, a heartbreakingly unsuccessful Sinatra-adjacent lounge singer who broke Robbie’s heart by abandoning his family but inspired Robbie with a complicated Oedipal need to prove himself, imitate him, gain his attention and surpass him. Alison Steadman plays his adored nan, who always believed in him. Jake Simmance is Gary Barlow, whose songwriting professionalism earns Robbie’s grudging respect. We see young chimpy Robbie audition for hatchet-faced promoter Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman) to join Take That – and the screenplay from Simon Gleeson, Oliver Cole and Michael Gracey gives Williams’s voiceover some carefully droll material about the enduring need to be quite polite about Martin-Smith for legal reasons. As Martin-Smith, Herriman has the funniest line; over dinner, he tells the fresh-faced band to look around the table. “In five years’ time we’ll all hate each other – but we’ll be rich!” That is not quite what happens. Robbie’s substance-abusing antics get him expelled from the band; and he makes a bid for solo stardom with the help of his new girlfriend, Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), while eaten up with jealousy for her band All Saints and their No 1 single. Songwriter Guy Chambers (Tom Budge) unlocks Robbie’s inner talent – and here again there is some interesting, legally constrained joking about Robbie and Guy going on beach holidays together. Robbie is fascinated and woundedly envious of Oasis’s colossal success and yearns for a massive Knebworth show of his own – and for his dad to love him. It is all watchably performed, but the chimp idea is not explored any further than simply making Robbie look like a chimp. We are not leading up to any Statue of Liberty on the beach moment; he just does what he would do anyway. As you gradually get used to him resembling a chimp, the ironising and surreal effect wears off, and the chimp face looks weirdly less compelling than Robbie’s vivid face, seen in pictures over the closing credits. The film is interestingly candid about the toxic, driving force of envy behind a musical career – something many music biopics omit – but in the end, however initially startling and amusing, Robbie-as-chimp feels like a distraction from his all-too-human unhappiness and talent. Better Man is in UK and Irish cinemas from 26 December. 3/5 https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/dec/2...-surreal-biopic

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Nice work and facts! :) Will use this data answering "Who is Robbie Williams?" On Twitter :) --- 'Better Man' Review: Robbie Williams Is a CGI Monkey In Wild Take on the Music Biopic Better Man is a strange musical biopic that sticks its wild landing, using unique means to tell another story about the dangers of overnight fame and unlimited access to narcotics. 7/10 https://collider.com/better-man-review-robbie-williams/

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Some pics from our special screening :) In Russian language the construction 'Better man' has no a direct translation because the construction with ER in the end means 'bigger, longer, better', etc. So in our variant the movie called like 'Be Better: History of Robbie Williams' if trying to translate back to English By the way, when Elton John' biopic Rocketman was released it named Рокетмэн what means exactly Rocketman.

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This! @1871209580568400283 https://consequence.net/list/best-movies-of...-annual-report/ In short: Better Man isn't just a great movie. It's a movie that makes you rethink all the possibilities of this genre.

I agree, it was a lovely duet :) Also it was a great last week for our forum! 22nd December 2024 01 145 Lady Gaga 4.56 02 141 Robbie Williams and Take That 4.44 03 79 Spice Girls 2.49

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Film Review: ‘Better Man’ Takes a Very Unusual Approach to Telling the Story of Robbie Williams You really can’t make a traditional biopic anymore. If there’s not something different about your film, audiences just won’t accept it these days. Cradle to the grave just doesn’t work. You either need to zoom in on a specific period in your subject’s life or tackle the genre in a different manner. With Better Man, the story of Robbie Williams has a hell of a hook, one I know most people were not expecting. It sounds bonkers, and it is, but somehow, it works. Better Man is able to distinguish itself by taking the piss out of how traditional this biopic would otherwise be. Williams is a superstar singer, sure, but the rise, fall, and redemption angle has been done so many times before. What makes it so unique here? Well, if you’re somehow not aware, Williams is depicted at all times as a CGI chimpanzee. No one calls attention to it, ever. To everyone else, it’s just Williams. To us, and to the man himself, it’s a chimp telling his tale. Readers, it livens things up in a way that damn near stunned me. We meet Robbie Williams (Jonno Davies for motion capture, Williams himself for the voice) as a boy (or as a young chimp) trying to impress his performer father Peter (Steve Pemberton). That will be a through line for his whole life, especially when Peter leaves to seek his own success. Left with his mother and grandmother, he’s not much of a student, but he is a showman. Eventually, that sheer force of personality makes him a part of a boy band that blows up, managed by the dismissive Nigel Martin Smith (Damon Herriman), beginning his rise to stardom. As he becomes more and more famous, Williams becomes a drunk and drug addict, romances Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), and gets into all sorts of trouble, all the while having Peter come in and out of his life. It’s all the sort of thing you’d get bored by, if not for the man himself having so much charisma, plus…yeah, he’s a monkey the whole time. In addition, there’s a sneakily emotional ending that works way better than you’re expecting, too. Having Robbie Williams voice his CGI self while Jonno Davies plays him through motion capture works so much better than you’d expect it to. Truly it does. They combine to never call attention to the gimmick or to their work, instead capturing the cinematic portrait of the man. It’s real strong teamwork. That’s important, too, since the other performances more or less fade into the background. Steve Pemberton is solid, but he’s in and out of the narrative. In addition to Raechelle Banno and Damon Herriman, supporting players here include Tom Budge, Frazer Hadfield, Anthony Hayes, Kate Mulvaney, Alison Steadman, and more. Director/co-writer Michael Gracey is emboldened by the ape aspect, which puts the film’s tongue firmly in cheek, even when covering all the expected territory. Along with co-writers Oliver Cole and Simon Gleeson, Gracey does the greatest hits, both in terms of the life story and the music. The script is nothing to get too excited about, but Gracey’s direction, which manages to never call extra attention to the chimp, is a highlight. I was not a fan of The Greatest Showman, but Gracey has won me over here. Plus, Williams himself has such personality, that shines through, helping to keep the flick from ever seeming plodding. Better Man works because it dares to be different in one sense. The biopic aspect is more or less standard issue, but the CGI chimp, alongside Williams’ charisma, is undeniable. Plus, while the original song Forbidden Road is no longer Oscar eligible, it’s a lovely tune at the end. If you’re a Robbie Williams fan, this is a must see. Everyone else? Prepare for something more fun than you might be expecting. SCORE: ★★★ https://awardsradar.com/2024/12/23/film-rev...obbie-williams/