by Michael McCarthy
I recently watched the Robbie Williams biopic Better Man. It’s one of the most unusual biopics I’ve ever seen since Robbie Williams is a CGI monkey in the film. No, really, it’s a documentary about Robbie Williams’ life, but he’s a monkey in the movie. I don’t think they ever refer to him as a monkey in the movie but he is, indeed, a monkey. But everyone else is human.
For me, there was one thing that kind of ruined the movie. And that is where they chose to use certain songs. For example, when Robbie Williams is in Take That, there’s a whole sequence that takes place set to the music of Robbie’s song “Rock DJ.” Well, “Rock DJ” is a single from Robbie’s third solo album, which came out several years after he had already left Take That. So it just seemed incredibly stupid, to me, that they had Take That dancing to a song that didn’t even exist when he was in Take That. In another scene, Robbie meets his longtime collaborator Guy Chambers for the first time. It’s not going so well initially but then Robbie plays him a bit of his song “Something Beautiful.” Well, that song is from Robbie’s album Escapology, which came out in the middle of his career, a good decade after Robbie first met Guy Chambers. So that was a stupid move, too.
It’s really unfortunate that they didn’t just use songs that were actually around at the time that the events in the movie take place. Robbie has a huge discography so it’s not like they couldn’t have found songs from the years in question. But for some reason I will never understand the songs often appear at times in Robbie’s life when those songs did not even exist yet.
Aside from the issue with the song placement, the movie is actually very entertaining. Somehow, the fact that Robbie is a chimpanzee in the movie almost makes him more sympathetic. It makes him almost seem childlike so you really feed bad for him even when his problems are of his own creation.
I already knew about Robbie’s issues with drug addiction and self-hate but there were some things in the movie that I didn’t know about. For one thing, he’s deeply affected by his dad but that’s not something I had ever really heard him discuss much in all of the many interviews I’ve read over the years. Also, he gets one of his girlfriends pregnant and she has an abortion and I certainly had never heard anything about that prior to this film. Of course, I’m sure there are things in the film that are sensationalized or even fictional, but since the girlfriend is an actual person in real life, I can’t imagine that they would have had her having an abortion in the movie it that hadn’t really happened. Otherwise, they’d be sued for slander.
All in all, it’s a solid film and certainly one of the most original biopics you’ll ever see. But I just kept growing more and more frustrated with it when they kept using songs during certain parts of Robbie’s life when those songs didn’t even actually exist yet. Because of that, I would only give it a C+. If they had used the songs that actually existed at the various points in time when the movie takes place, I would have loved it. I just couldn’t let that go, though.
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