Robbie Williams has been in a refreshingly reflective mood of late. The star has given increasingly honest interviews and held his hands up to his own past transgressions in recent years.
It was impossible not to feel empathy for him as he opened up about his time in Take That for the BBC’s recent documentary series Boyband’s Forever, recalling the cruelty inflicted on him by the music industry before he even reached adulthood.
Therefore it seems surprising that he would choose to be represented as a chimpanzee in the big screen biopic of his life Better Man, which arrives in cinemas on Boxing Day.
He has justified the decision saying he has often felt like a performing monkey in his career and the metaphor is obvious, even if you are not familiar with Robbie’s career. However, it wears very thin very quickly.
Robbie’s story is made for the big screen treatment. It is a redemption tale that has seen him overcome his demons and addicitions to become a happy, settled husband and father of four.
The movie doesn’t shy away from the lows of his life – his father leaving when he was a child and the issues it caused him, the frustration of being in a boy band and all it entailed, his astonishing appetite for drugs and alcohol.
It even includes his ex- fiancée Nicole Appleton’s abortion at the insistence of her record company, which only served to send Robbie further off the rails at the height of his addictions.
It is an emotional story. It is a powerful story. And it is impossible to take it seriously when it is being portrayed by a monkey. It also becomes somewhat creepy during racier scenes! I defintely did not need to see a chimpanzee surrounded by naked women in bed!
Obviously the character is the work of CGI and was performed by Jonno Davies using motion capture while Robbie voices himself. While all of the other cast members, including Inside Number 9’s Steve Pemberton as his father and Gavin and Stacey’s Alison Steadman, give phenomonel performances it feels like “Robbie” never emotes to their level as the CGI gets in the way. As such you never get fully absorbed by the character.
It appears, despite all his recent soul searching Robbie is still wearing a mask and hiding behind the chimpanzee persona.
This may be partly due to how he portrays some key figures in his story. At one point he says: “Revenge has an energy and it’s seductive” and it seems retribution is still an attractive prospect to him despite his personal growth.
Take That’s former manager Nigel Martin-Smith and lead singer Gary Barlow don’t come out of the story well (although he makes amends with Gary at the end). Perhaps by utilising the CGI chimpanzee he is hoping to brush off any backlash from this – “it wasn’t me it was the character,” type thing.
It is a shame that Robbie didn’t have the courage to allow himself to be portrayed as a human being in the flick as it is a great story with soaring highs, devastating lows and everything in between and, other than the primate in the room, it is very well told.
The script is clever, the musical numbers are epic and sweeping and it looks fabulous. It has a similar feel to Elton John’s biopic Rocketman. But Elton, didn’t feel the need to hide behind a CGI animal.
If it wasn’t for the monkey I would have loved this. As it stands it was entertaining but incredibly weird and discombobulating.