Better man: self-portrait with monkey

Last year, a story broke about Robbie Williams taking a walk in a well-known London park with his wife, dressed in pink and wearing diamond-encrusted sunglasses, and no one recognized him. The singer had filmed himself, as if it were an experiment, to see what would happen, but no one stopped him, which worried him. Then, walking back through his neighborhood, a girl stopped him to ask for a photo.

That's precisely what Better Man is largely about: fame as part of the need to be recognized, to be admired by thousands of people. Better Man, a biopic about Robbie Williams' life, stars not an actor playing the singer, but a monkey. Far from being a mere illustration of the highlights of its subject's life, it's a surprising, moving, and hypnotic musical biography, with numerous visually stunning and fantastic moments (in both senses of the word: fantastical and excellent). Over its two-hour runtime, it manages to raise the question of why fame is so much about one's chosen art form as it is about personal life. And all this in a film starring an ape.

There's a fascinating aspect to the fact that we can easily enter the film's world of plausibility, and the fact that the star is an animal doesn't prevent us from following his story with curiosity and identifying with him.

The monkey as the protagonist is related to Robbie Williams' own self-perception. The singer has expressed that he has always felt less evolved than other people. In Better Man, this evolution takes on more than one layer. On one hand, it's the pursuit of fame as a way to stand out from the crowd and be admired by the public, as a way to combat his inferiority complex. The character's path to fame involves moving from wanting recognition for the sake of success alone, to understanding that his music acquires value once it involves something personal and intimate (his producer, Guy Chambers, tells him in a key scene, "songs are only valuable if they cost you something"). But the evolution is also, of course, the musician's quest to improve himself as a person ("to be a better man," hence the song that gives the film its title) once his personal life, fueled by fame, has spiraled out of control, and Robbie must reconcile with those who stood by him. His career begins as something that puts him above "normal" people, but little by little it consumes him, deteriorating his relationship with Take That, leading to arguments with his girlfriend and his best friend, and ultimately causing him to miss his grandmother's death.

The fact that Robbie Williams is an ape instead of a flesh-and-blood person isn't the only unusual thing about the film. There's also a fantastical element in the way director Michael Gracey films Robbie's experiences, as if they were fictional events, often interwoven in a strange way, mixing moments from different time periods in a single sequence where his private life coexists with his life as a singer. This is best seen when his girlfriend, Fiona, leaves him after discovering him using drugs in the bathroom. We see Williams run out of his apartment to talk to her and fall down the stairs, landing directly in his dressing room before a concert. The next thing we see is Robbie receiving a call from his mother with the news of his grandmother's death, and the film seamlessly blends the funeral with his performance on stage. The moment becomes even more intense because the song the musician is performing is “Angels,” a song that seems to speak precisely about the affection that someone who is no longer in the earthly world can give.

Besides the simian characterization of its protagonist, the other central element for understanding Robbie Williams is his voice-over. This voice can serve to tell us about the joy or sadness he feels in the face of what is happening to him, but it also serves more than once to make himself the object of ridicule, or to show us how he struggles with his fragile mental health and lack of self-esteem, which led him to believe that all his success was a farce, and that he would never be able to go on stage because he was truly useless. And almost always, in all these cases, only the viewer has the advantage of accessing Williams's conflicted subjectivity, while the rest of the characters (perhaps with the exception of his father, the character with whom Robbie seems to have the most affection) can only see him as someone who has achieved stardom and deals with what this entails: be it Nigel, Take That's manager, when he challenges him for his clumsiness on stage;whether it's his girlfriend, singer Nicole Appleton, whom he criticizes for having reached number one, as if that were truly a personal triumph; whether it's his friend Nate, whom he throws in his face for his success when Nate questions it; or whether it's his mother and grandmother, who go from seeing Robbie as a young man interested in music to being surprised when their house is filled with fans of his singing career.

The moment when this subjectivity, which only Robbie and the viewers know, is best seen is when it explodes: the scene in which he sees himself fighting against his past selves, which Gracey films spectacularly as if it were an epic battle worthy of a fantasy adventure film (or Planet of the Apes, taking advantage of the fact that they share characters of the same species).

There's a very noble sense of honesty, both in Better Man and in the figure of Williams, in making us share in the subjective experience of a singer whom everyone saw at the top, while inside he could only feel less evolved than everyone else. Hence, it's also a clever move on the part of the film to make it so that only the viewers can see the musician as a monkey, while everyone else sees him as a human being.

I read a review that commented on how hard it is to believe that Better Man was a box office flop, costing $110 million and only grossing $20 million. Actually, I don't think it's that difficult to explain. While biopics about musical figures have produced some very successful films in recent years (with Bohemian Rhapsody leading the way, perhaps the one that revived this subgenre), Robbie Williams's persona never achieved much success in the United States. If we add to that the fact that he's been rather absent from the music scene lately, and that portraying him as a primate might seem a bit disconcerting, it all seems to fit together. But it doesn't matter. Better Man is a wonderful film, and it's impossible to forget that we spent over two hours watching, with fascination and excitement, something that at first glance seemed as outlandish as a singing monkey trying to become famous.