‘Better Man’ Review: A Simian Is Born
In July, a pygmy hippopotamus was born at the Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Thailand. Moo Deng – her name translates to bouncy pork – became a star overnight. You will have seen the memes while doom-scrolling or else a co-worker will have shown you pictures of the irresistible, endangered animal. There is currently a livestream set up in the hippopotamus section of the zoo; at the time of writing, Moo Deng appears to be sleeping soundly. Is it tough being a famous animal? She’s not spiralling in a hotel suite or clubbing until 5AM, but then again, visitor numbers have skyrocketed and time limits have been imposed on visiting her enclosure. Here to shed some light on exactly that is Better Man, a Robbie Williams biopic from director Michael Gracey, in which the singer appears not as a handsome Englishman but a chimpanzee. Imagine the pub trip that led to that idea.
Chimp Robbie is played and voiced by Jonno Davies. Everyone else is a human, including long-suffering mother Janet (Kate Mulvany), largely absent comedian father Peter (Steve Pemberton) and grandmother Betty (Alison Steadman). All the greatest hits are here: Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman) creating Take That; Robbie’s rivalry with songwriting superstar Gary Barlow (Jake Simmance); the turbulent love story with All Saints singer Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno). The insecurity, the solo career. The drink, the drugs, the downfall. And through it all, we get Robbie: cheeky (that adjective is used a lot in this film), self-sabotaging, lost. There’s some intrigue in all this – the ‘90s are presented like ancient history, and that doesn’t feel misplaced – but it’s a very familiar story (Netflix released a docuseries about Williams last year).
As far as metaphors go, pop star as zoo animal is not exactly new. If you Google “celebrities feel like zoo animals”, you will find quotations from Ed Sheeran, Kanye West, Justin Bieber in seconds. Cara Delevingne, Kim Kardashian, and more. No doubt many famous people feel the exact same way even if they do not express it publicly. Better Man gets some juice out of visualising this. When chimp Robbie is younger, it’s clear he doesn’t fit in. He’s not like the other boys in Stoke: he’s charming and destined to be a star (and you know, he is a chimp). When chimp Robbie is struggling to lay down vocals in the studio, we stare at him behind the booth glass, like it’s feeding time at London Zoo. When chimp Robbie goes off the rails, and his then-girlfriend Nicole finds him doing heroin in their North London flat… well, that’s when the metaphor stretches awfully thin. Sometimes a chimp doing heroin is just a chimp doing heroin.
Elsewhere, there isn’t enough fresh imagery to make this story (rags to riches to rehab) feel new. Chimp Robbie often feels like he’s drowning, so there’s a sequence in which he crashes his car into the sea. When he performs a gig at Knebworth – performing to a crowd of 375,000 over three days – chimp Robbie experiences a mental breakdown, fighting versions of himself from past eras. There’s some visceral horror to that sequence but it reminded me of a mash-up between Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and Taylor Swift’s video for diss track “Look What You Made Me Do” in which the superstar fought past versions of herself. Even the musical sequences – a parade of Robbie songs from “Come Undone” to “Rock DJ” – feels like a retread of music videos: Bag Raiders had a chimp fall in love with a blonde girl in “Sunlight”, one of The Kinks dressed up as a gorilla for “Apeman”. (And that’s just the apes! Open it up to other species, and there’s an entire subcategory of videos in which artists dress up as animals.)
Around halfway through the film, the novelty of watching a chimpanzee – and credit to Davies and visual effects studio Weta, the ape embodies Williams – wears off and the tedium of a pop star biopic takes over. It is impossible to forget the singer’s involvement in Better Man: Williams narrates the entire thing, and the overlong climax centres around his 2001 concert at the Royal Albert Hall (that gig took place two years before Knebworth, but we need a triumphant finish so: timeline acrobatics, please!). The singer-cum-ape wells up as he brings his father onstage to sing “My Way”, and you think: it’s sort of funny that he’s a chimpanzee, and it is kind of cool that the filmmakers pulled this idea off, but what is so both shocking and disappointing is how traditional this feels.
‘Better Man’ is in cinemas from 26 December
You Might Also Like
