Monkeying Around With the Biopic Genre?

Better Man was an unusual movie released late last year, with a quirky patchwork of reasons why it might appeal to me -- and not appeal to me.

On the cons list: it's yet another musician biopic, and could be expected to observe all the tired cliches of that genre. It's about a musician of no particular importance to me: Robbie Williams. Though Williams was part of Take That, a mega-successful boy band of early 1990s, that band's global domination weirdly skipped the United States -- where their single modest hit ("Back for Good") was an atypical ballad that did nothing to draw attention to the rest of their music.

On the pros side: Better Man is a musical, immediately lifting it from the morass of biopics into at least the Rocket Man kind of sub-category, a movie trying to do something a little different. It's directed by Michael Gracey, the director of The Greatest Showman, one of the more entertaining film musicals in recent memory, making it more likely this movie would be a fun and boisterous affair.

Then there's the "I don't know what to make of this" element of the movie: the lead character is a walking-talking-singing-dancing chimpanzee. A CG-rendered, anthropomorphic, "Planet of the Apes" style monkey man. And the only way that this will be acknowledged by any character at any point in the movie is when the narrator (actual Robbie Williams) cheekily notes that he's often felt "less evolved" than the other people around him.

Having now watched Better Man, I must admit: they fooled me. They added enough quirky elements to this movie to make me believe it would be something different. But they tricked me into watching something pretty much the same as everything else.

They really didn't make anything out of the CG-ape-ness of it all. I suppose it added spectacle, since the degree of difficulty here for believably adding a CG character to a real-world setting is as high as it could be. But you could argue it detracts from the movie more than it brings. To fully appreciate it, you have to let yourself be taken out of the narrative to simply watch the technical achievement. Even then, you can still take the technical achievement for granted; after all, this was just one of three movies featuring anthropomorphic apes that was nominated for the most recent Best Visual Effects Oscar. (The other two being the newest Planet of the Apes movie, and the flying monkeys of Wicked.)

With the story not actually altered by its main character's simian nature, the next fallback position to find something different here is the musical elements. Here, at least, Better Man serves up flashes of brilliance. A handful of sequences fully embrace the artifice of musical theater, and director Michael Gracey makes the most of it being a film musical. The pinnacle is the "Rock DJ" sequence, a preposterously elaborate dance number presented as a single camera take, whizzing through multiple settings and costume changes as it builds to feature a literal cast of thousands. It's the kind of thing I was hoping for out of the whole movie. (And on its own, was good enough to make me decide to blog about this movie in the first place.)

Unfortunately, too many of the movie's songs are actual performances, where characters are singing diegetically on stage. All these moments lack the ambition and scope of the fantasy sequences. If you were to strip this "musical" down to just the non-realistic numbers, you can count the songs on one hand. And so you're left with a movie that has two wild baked-in premises -- it's a musical, and it stars an ape -- that only half engages with one of those premises. Otherwise, it trucks in all the tropes about struggle and success, rising and falling and rising again, that makes every biopic look like every other biopic.

And yet... I found a collective, say, 20 minutes of this movie to be kind of fantastic: huge, escapist, exciting, and bubbly. So much so that even though the remaining almost-two-hours of the movie left me cold, I'd pencil it out to a C overall. And I could imagine the ways in which other people might love the movie without reservation. Maybe you love the biopic genre in a way I don't. Maybe the visual amazement of the effects is enough for you, regardless of the story. Maybe you're a huge Take That or Robbie Williams fan, or at least know more than one of their songs (that isn't even in the movie). If any of those describes you, you might really enjoy Better Man.

And if it doesn't, maybe take three-and-a-half minutes and go enjoy the best sequence in the entire movie.