Film Review: Better Man
Tonight’s fillum was ‘Better Man’ (2024) about the life of English singer Robbie Williams. Williams is portrayed as an anthropomorphic chimpanzee with computer-generated imagery (CGI), yet it all seems perfectly natural.
Additional funding came via the Australian government’s Producer Offset and Film Victoria’s incentive programmes. Principal photography took place at the Docklands Studios Melbourne, in May and June 2022.
Filming of concert scenes from his “Live At The Albert” show in 2001 were filmed at the Royal Albert Hall in London during Williams’ concert appearances. Ii hope the monkey gets an Oscar.
TRIVIA
The film arose from multiple interview recordings filmmaker Michael Gracey made with Robbie Williams during the course of a year and a half in Williams’ recording studio in Los Angeles, in the United States. Although the interviews weren’t originally for a film, as Gracey “just wanted to capture [Williams] in his own voice telling his story,” the majority of Williams’ voiceover in the film is from those recordings.
Securing permission to shoot the lavish dance sequence on Regent Street in London took a year and an half as the British Crown Estate owns it. Two nights before filming was scheduled, after spending an entire week in rehearsal, Queen Elizabeth II passed away and the shoot had to be postponed. Everyone had to be paid anyway, including shop owners and crew, and production insurance didn’t cover the losses due to death of a monarch. Producers had to raise additional funds to shoot the sequence, which filmed five months later.
Robbie Williams attended the Benelux premiere in Amsterdam on 10 December 2024. Before the movie started, he did a live interview with Gerard Ekdom, a well-known radio personality from The Netherlands. When asked by Gerard what the audience could expect, Robbie said; “I’m showing everything in this movie except my hemorrhoids.” Robbie also warned the audience about being portrayed by a monkey: “the first five minutes you’ll think, ‘wtf?’ But after eight minutes, you’ll be completely okay with it.”
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 89% of 201 critics’ reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.4/10. The website’s consensus reads: “Daring to substitute its marquee star with a VFX creation and somehow pulling it off, Better Man makes a monkey out of the traditional musical biopic to thrilling effect.”
Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 77 out of 100, based on 42 critics, indicating “generally favourable” reviews.
Clint Worthington of RogerEbert.com awarded the film 4 out of 4 stars. He praised the pacing, the musical sequences, and the inventiveness, writing that the use of a monkey to portray Williams delivered a “curveball” away from the usual tropes of the musical biopic.
In a 3 1/2 out of 4 star review for The Washington Post, Michael Andor Brodeur described the computer-generated monkey as “astonishingly expressive and strangely disarming” for recounting Williams’s journey through fame.
In another positive review, Jeannette Catsoulis of The New York Times commended the film for capturing the vulnerabilities of Williams as he struggled with addiction, insecurity, and relationships, writing: “Neither hagiography nor hatchet job, the movie casts an understanding eye on a once-infamous musical artist who weathered dizzying highs and devastating lows”.
