One could say Robbie Williams is little more than an animal.
Williams has been in the spotlight since he was 15, when he joined the hit boy band Take That. He’s been performing for others so long that he doesn’t believe he’s ever had the chance to evolve into a man. It’s why, in this biopic about the real Robbie Williams’ life, he depicts himself as a monkey.
And despite enduring a life full of twists, turns and tragedies, he couldn’t stop following his father, Peter’s, advice: If you don’t want to be a nobody, you need to become famous.
But how much fame and affirmation are enough to satiate a man?
So Robbie continues to sing. He continues to dance. He becomes a performing monkey, doing what the people want, when and how they want it.
Robbie knows what he’s doing is killing him. He knows if he keeps going, he’s going to die.
But he needs the praise. He needs the love. He needs to become one of the gods.
He can’t stop.
Better Man effectively shows the dangers of craving the world’s attention and affection. Throughout most of the movie, Robbie desperately desires to gain more fame, and the pursuit only makes him miserable.
His identity is dependent on being famous, so he does away with who he truly is in order to achieve his goal: he changes a lot of who he is—even his name—so that more people will like him. But with every change, he only finds apparitions of his self-doubt revealing his true, depressed, feelings. Robbie gains the world, but he realizes that he’s lost everything else—and he finds, eventually, that the world doesn’t truly satisfy.
When Robbie does experience this breakthrough, he decides to go to rehab to get help in rebuilding his life. And he begins to recognize the pain he’s caused some people and seeks to apologize for his mistakes.
Others speak into how Robbie doesn’t need to change himself to be special. While Robbie’s father plants an idea in Robbie’s head that he’s worthless unless he’s famous, his nana reminds him that even if he lives a simple life, he can never be a nobody. And even though fame might feel affirming, Robbie’s value is inherent to who he is, not what he does or what the world thinks of him.
Likewise, a friend tells Robbie that the reason his songs sound bad is because it’s obvious he’s writing what others want to hear rather than what’s important to him. He encourages Robbie to write music that personally resonates with himself.
Robbie’s father is enraptured with famous singers. Robbie tells us that his father viewed these men as gods—and Peter eventually abandons his family to pursue stardom to “be one step closer to his gods.” Later, we’re told that the singers are gods “because they make other peoples’ problems go away.” And when Robbie reaches stardom, his father approvingly tells him that he’s become one of the gods.
Robbie laments “I sit and talk to God, and He just laughs at my plans.”
Robbie describes the LGBT community as the “Promised Land.” Take That sings a song called “I Found Heaven.” Someone wears an ankh necklace.
A light shines down from the sky, which stops someone from killing himself.
Sex is a frequent topic in the film. We see Robbie in bed with naked women, their breasts exposed. Fans of Robbie flash their breasts at him. Furthermore, the male members of Take That wear intentionally provocative costumes that are little more than thongs, leaving their rears exposed and highlighting their crotches.
A fan performs a sex act on Robbie. He also masturbates as the camera focuses on his face. The band builds publicity by helping teach an anatomy class, and we see a depiction of a penis. A girl tells someone how she plans to “accidentally” touch a man’s crotch. Someone draws a depiction of male genitals. Robbie discusses how he’d be bad at stripping. While a woman dances, her dress occasionally flies up, exposing her underwear.
The members of Take That are often shirtless (if not wearing less) and are ogled by women and gay men alike. Robbie tells us that they started as a boy band for the gay scene, and we see them perform at a gay nightclub. This prompts Robbie to tell us of how people speculated about his sexuality. In another instance, he rubs his body on a man during a performance.
However, the band eventually performs for club full of women which is more helpful in making them famous, and they pivot to female audiences. When female fans come to see them, they’re told to “keep it in your pants” and not touch the fans, but the girls launch themselves at the boys, leaving them to disregard the latter rule. They often perform sensual dance moves while on stage.
There are additionally frequent references to many, many sex-related things, such as genitals, condoms and lubricant. Robbie makes a joke about the size of his anatomy and another one about BDSM. Take That sells a themed pillow by saying fans can now “sleep with Take That.” Robbie says he’s slept with most of the members of the Spice Girls. Robbie also engages in an affair.
Men and women kiss. And I suppose since Williams depicts himself as a monkey, we also have to say that a male monkey and a human woman kiss, too.
Other monkeys stand in the crowd of Robbie’s performances—symbolic apparitions of his own self-loathing staring back at him. Whenever he sees them, they say increasingly violent things to him, such as how they’re going to “slit his throat, cut out his eyes and peel his skin off,” all culminating in them telling him that he’s going to die. They eventually attempt to orchestrate the event, charging at him with weapons. He fights them off, killing them in a variety of ways: stabbing, decapitation—and he kills a child monkey representative of himself when he was a child. A monkey is covered in blood.
In another scene, Robbie drives recklessly down the road, crashing through a gate and nearly hitting some fans with his car. He narrowly avoids crashing into some cars, and when a vehicle approaches from the other side, he considers intentionally crashing into it to end his life. However, he avoids the car and swerves into a lake, sinking to the bottom. As he swims up, he’s attacked by phantom apparitions representing fans and the entertainment media, which prevent him from surfacing—a symbolic representation of how he feels as if he’s drowning as a result of his fame.
Someone contemplates suicide via cutting his wrists and very nearly goes through with it. Someone suffers a panic attack.
A girl gets smacked in the face when a door flies open. Someone destroys the interior of a house. A boy gets hit in the face with a soccer ball.
A woman decides to abort her baby.
The f-word is used about 120 times, and the s-word is used 17 times. The c-word is also uttered nearly 10 times. Other crudities and slang terms are also used to describe male and female genitalia. We also hear “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “h—,” “b–tard” and “t-t” all used. Various British vulgarities are heard as well.
God’s name is used in vain eight times, with one use followed by “d–n.” Jesus’ name is used in vain five times. We see crude hand gestures.
Better Man depicts Robbie’s struggle with drug use. He uses cocaine and heroin at various points onscreen, and he snorts powder off a woman’s chest. He’s forced to perform while incapacitated by the drugs, and he’s seen shaking without them. Robbie goes to rehab and begins his journey to recovery. Someone consumes antidepressants alongside alcohol.
Underaged people drink and become intoxicated. Others drink alcohol, too. Others smoke cigarettes.
Robbie’s father abandons his family in order to pursue stardom. It’s only when Robbie gets a taste of fame that he reaches out again—it becomes apparent that his father, at least in the film, has only returned because Robbie is famous. He encourages Robbie to make increasingly reckless decisions in order to continue growing in fame despite how they’re hurting Robbie.
Robbie becomes addicted to obtaining fame and affirmation, but it takes him a long time to recognize that no amount of worldly affection will ever be enough to satisfy him.
Robbie develops the mentality that “to get to the top, you’ve often got to tear others down.”
Someone vomits.
The best way I could describe Better Man is if someone took The Greatest Showman, Whiplash and Rise of the Planet of the Apes and threw them all in a blender.
The first should be obvious since Michael Gracey, the director of Better Man, also directed The Greatest Showman. No surprise, then, that we get some intense and impressive dance numbers. The second also makes sense, as both this movie and Whiplash play as tragedies starring musicians who all-but lose themselves seeking the affirmation of others.
And as for the third connection?
Well, that’s just because Robbie Williams stars as a CGI monkey.
Given that the film showcases Williams’ struggle to feel valued without the approval of his fans (which likewise seems to be rooted to his desire to make his father proud), Better Man is perhaps the only biopic where its subject’s involvement in helping make it feels somewhat inappropriate.
As I’ve written this review, I can’t help but wonder if praise for the movie is the last thing someone who so deeply desires affirmation would need. As I neared this conclusion, I further wondered if the film’s title, which shares the same name as a song by the band Oasis, might be a sly dig at Oasis lead singer Liam Gallagher, with whom he frequently feuded in the ‘90s.
Still, it’s hard to think that Better Man will find much success in the United States. Whereas Robbie Williams is relatively well known overseas, the artist remains more obscure here. In fact, when the prescreening audience were asked if they’d heard of Robbie Williams before, only four or five people (roughly five percent of the theater) raised their hands.
It becomes even more difficult to imagine the movie’s success due to some heavy content issues. Like the testimonies of many musicians, Williams’ life (and his biopic) is filled with heavy drug use, sex and nudity, crude language and a miserable father figure. Further included are LGBT elements, violence, contemplations of suicide and abortion. They’re real parts of Williams’ story, ones that are as visceral as they are key moments in understanding him. But they’re moments that I can’t imagine many will want to see.
Kennedy Unthank studied journalism at the University of Missouri. He knew he wanted to write for a living when he won a contest for “best fantasy story” while in the 4th grade. What he didn’t know at the time, however, was that he was the only person to submit a story. Regardless, the seed was planted. Kennedy collects and plays board games in his free time, and he loves to talk about biblical apologetics. He thinks the ending of Lost “wasn’t that bad.”
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