Dawn of the Biopic of the Apes
Who the hell is Robbie Williams? In 'Better Man,' he's a chimp, obviously.
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Who the hell is Robbie Williams and why is he famous?
It’s a question that has plagued me for 20 years now, maybe more. I remember an album called “The Ego Has Landed,” from reading about it in various music and/or celebrity magazines, a title that had somehow stuck in my head all these years — possibly partly because I wasn’t sure who this man was or what he might have an inflated ego about. What was this ego, and where might it land? He felt like a reaction to an entirely separate media apparatus I never knew existed. And apparently that came out in 1999.
My continued ignorance doesn’t even especially feel like a knock against Robbie Williams himself. He’s just one of those celebrities that was already so famous in the UK before anyone in the US knew who he was, that trying to learn about him felt like trying to catch up on Game of Thrones during its final season when you’d never seen an episode. At a certain point, you come to understand that the cultural conversation has passed you by, and trying to catch up feels like entirely too much work. I should probably look into that, you think, and then forget about it for another six months.
That’s about where I was when I saw my first trailer for Better Man, a movie with a title that reflexively conjures Pearl Jam for me but that apparently starred an anthropomorphized CGI chimpanzee. That CGI chimpanzee, as it turns out, is Robbie Williams. And Better Man is a jukebox biopic about Robbie Williams, in which the CGI chimp is voiced by Robbie fucking Williams.
Why a chimp? Because, as explained by Robbie Williams, “they say your personality freezes at the age you get famous. For me, that number was 15. So I guess you could say that makes me less evolved.”
Less evolved. A chimp. Get it? Paramount spent $110 million making this mildly clever conceit come to life, which is actually beautiful.
Better Man turns out to be full of helpful little explanations like this, both for its own existence and for its star. Just before the end credits roll, after chimp-Williams plays a one-man show in a tux at a massive concert hall with seating in the round, the main question on my mind was what the fuck kind of music even IS this?
At which point Chimp Williams stares directly into the camera and says, “So yeah, it might be cabaret. But it’s world class cabaret, and I’m the fucking best at it. Fuck you.”
Oh, now I get it! Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?
As it turns out, Better Man’s overtly kitsch and corny artistic conceits match its subject matter almost perfectly: a cheeky little movie about a cheeky little man. Biopics in general, and biopics about famous musical acts in particular, are only ever very thinly disguised exercises in image management anyway. So why not have the artist himself speak directly to the audience in his own voice (Kenny Powers listening to his own autobiography on audiotape in Eastbound and Down comes to mind)? And why not dress it up with mildly ridiculous CGI? Better Man is so silly that it’s actually brilliant.
On another level, certain documentarians, like Lance Oppenheim and Joshua Oppenheimer (the name similarity is just a coincidence), have structured their work around the premise that giving a subject a platform for artifice is actually more revealing of their character than trying to observe them in their “natural” habitats (insofar as that’s even possible). Which is to say, maybe a vanity biopic in which Robbie Williams plays himself as a transparently self-serving PR exercise actually has the potential to be more insightful than, say, a non-kitsch non-musical starring Timothee Chalamet or whoever singing Robbie Williams songs.
I don’t know that Better Man entirely achieves the promise of that pitch (which in fairness I just invented), or what insight into Robbie Williams would even look like considering I knew almost nothing about him before I saw this movie, but Better Man is winningly absurd for most of its runtime (with all due credit to director Michael Gracey, previously of The Greatest Showman, who really has fun with this thing). Some of the extended musical numbers do get a little boring after a while, with not one, but two extended dream sequences featuring Chimp Robbie trapped underneath a frozen pond (a frozen pond of emotion!).
and one could easily believe that the film cost a third of what it actually did, but it is also easily better than Rocketman or Bohemian Rhapsody or, God forbid, One Love (or that Amy Winehouse bio — did you know that came out less than a year ago?? lol).
We open with chimp Robbie (or Robert, which the film will actually attempt to convince us is a meaningful distinction) cheekily trying to win a football (soccer) match, despite being a scrawny unspectacular little bugger who has no business dreaming of sport superstardom. But dream he does. Because if little Robert is one thing, that thing is cheeky. And if he’s two things, those things are cheeky and absolutely thirsty for the spotlight, convinced the he both deserves to be famous and that fame will solve all his problems.
What problems, you ask? Would it shock you if I said “daddy issues?” Little chimp Robert, as Better Man tells it, unfortunately idolizes his charming drunk of a father, who himself idolizes “all the stars of the day.” Like Frank Sinatra, who we see on the Williams’ television screen, performing “My Way” while Robert and his father, Peter (Steve Pemberton) sing along, using a beer bottle as a microphone.
I highlight the “stars of the day” line in particular because Robbie Williams is only a half generation older than me at most, and for people my age, Frank Sinatra might as well have been Lilian Gish or Rudolph Valentino. Nonetheless, for the entire film, Robbie Williams (as he’s renamed by his first manager) keeps pictures of Sinatra, Sammy Davis, and Dean Martin in his green room to kiss before every show like religious idols. That this guy grew up idolizing forgotten stars in some grey backwater British Branson Missouri actually explains a lot.
It’s the little, possibly unintentional (or at least, untentionally telling) details of Better Man like this that keep things interesting. Little Robert’s father eventually abandons his family to become whatever the British equivalent is of a Borscht Belt comedian (a bangers belt comedian?). Robert takes a few lessons from this — like that the spotlight is more important than family and that fame is the only way to win his father’s respect. He also, as mentioned, has the head of a chimp. But if any of the other characters in Better Man acknowledge this, they never comment upon it (I gather that the chimp thing is more Robert’s self-perception than theirs).
Young Robert is in the process of flunking out of school (Williams’ incredibly thorough Wikipedia page says that he suffers from both dyslexia and dyscalculia) when he hears about some boy band auditions from the family radio. Chimp Robert ditches exams to attend, singing and dancing a perfectly adequate rendition of a lounge standard in front of the bored manager, and it seems as if his dreams of fame are hopeless. Until, on a whim, he makes a cheeky little dad joke on his way out the door, about telling all the other boys that they can go home now and gives the manager a wink. “As it turned out, that little wink would change my entire life,” adult Robbie informs us via voiceover.
Cheekiness, as Better Man tells it, is Robbie Williams’ superpower. That his particular set of skills, in the form of that particularly British variety of drunken football hooligan fetch us a pint, wouldja luv? dad charm, as learned from his actual lounge act father, actually explains a lot. Specifically, about how Robbie Williams could become so famous and beloved to British people, and in a way that never quite translated to Americans. Oftentimes it’s hard to tell whether Better Man is legitimately groundbreaking or hopeless corny, but it’s definitely good storytelling.
Robert eventually does get chosen for that boy band, at the tender age of 15 (can a person even flunk out of school at 15??), and that boy band eventually becomes the pop sensation Take That, another act that most Americans probably hadn’t heard of. The teenage quintet, at the urging of their Svengali manager, Nigel Martin Smith (played by prolific Australian “that guy,” Damon Herriman) get their start performing sexualized cheesecake routines in gay bars, one of those little details that I wish Better Man had spent more time on. But they don’t truly hit until Smith books them a gig performing for young girls. Why these dancing underage twinks played better with tween girls than with adult gay drunks isn’t immediately apparent, and while I guess I can understand why the movie wouldn’t focus on it, suffice it to say I would happily read an essay on the subject.
Somewhere around this time, Smith renames Robert “Robbie,” a name he doesn’t like and had never before been called. Sidenote: you’re telling me British guys never tried to shorten “Robert?” Fuuuuuuck off. Anyway, Robert ends up liking becoming Robbie, because, as he tells us via voiceover, “it gave me a persona I could hide in, like a disguise.”
A celebrity creating an alter ego to use to keep their own personality shielded from the expectations of fans and reporters is maybe the most hackneyed conceit of the last 100 years of soft focus celebrity profiles, and the fact that it’s delivered here entirely earnestly, and that the alter ego in question is a guy named “Robert” going by “Robbie” is what makes Better Man so fucking perfect. It has basically all the clichés of popstar origin stories taken to their logical extremes where they become brilliant tongue-in-cheek parody.
Beyond an absentee father, the other major conflict of Better Man (beyond its subject being sort of a needy, immature asshole most of the time) is Robbie Williams’ self-doubt. Which is illustrated, hilariously, by a conceit in which Chimp Robbie is constantly heckled by visions of other Chimp Robbies sitting in the audience, who tell him he sucks and will never be any good every time he performs. The enemy, was the inner me, as another great existential buffoon Kimbo Slice once said (RIP).