Movies: Better Man
A daring summon for the courage to change
I watched this movie with a friend on New Year’s Day. This is a simple film with a familiar premise—a rock star in an autobiographical narrative—and equally simple gimmick: depicting the rock star as he sees himself. It’s easy to dismiss the twist. Computer-generated imagery is in its earliest stage, all things considered, in spite of the best efforts of Robert Zemeckis and others. Results often take you out of the movie. I’m not an early adapter when it comes to technology. I like bugs to be worked out with exceptions, such as the iPad, which I eagerly adopted in its first iteration.
But Better Man is brilliant, thanks to its director Michael Gracey, who previously directed the marvelous musical The Greatest Showman for 20th Century Fox before the studio was bought by the Walt Disney Studios. How the rock star, former Take That bandmate Robbie Williams, whom I’d never heard of before this film, sees himself is as a chimpanzee. This is not a preposterous twist: Williams’s poisonous self-loathing stems from a basic boyhood breach of self-esteem in which he feels gripped and stunted by being fundamentally unwanted, unloveable or utterly without value; the boy spins into feeling both paralyzed and unable to evolve and a sense of imagined grandeur.
Even the latter, steeped by his policeman father in alcohol and the music and style of Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, is contaminated. The sensitive child, whose reflection on a television screen cues his future, longs for the bond of love between father and son. The boy’s and movie’s first song is one of the film’s best, though, overall, the music is not as melodic as songs in Gracey’s earlier musical with Hugh Jackman. Soon, the child Robert, enamored with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., discovers the blues. The catalyst is abandonment.
I’ve been thinking about abandonment, which, for personal reasons, interests me. I think it’s a pervasive problem throughout today’s world and I think it seeds self-abnegation. Frankly, I don’t think self-sacrifice would be as tempting and insidious if the avoidant people of the world showed up, took responsibility and stopped abandoning work, loved ones and their own professed values. Or at least account and atone when they do. In this regard, Better Man—a movie which will probably be easily dismissed because it’s featuring man re-imagined as a monkey—is stupendous.
Of course, the chimp portrayal figures into the plot about the abandoned, sensitive, rebellious boy who becomes an artist and rock star—or, more exactly, a rock star and artist—because the entertainer, particularly the male entertainer, is expected to be a clown, a farce and an imbecile, one who is emphatically not to be taken seriously. Thou must not take life or art seriously, goes the commandment that all male persons in performance must be asinine, stupid and, as the writers of Better Man put it, “cheeky”. Men are expected to be like monkeys: as mindless and sex-craved as apes.
Robert gets a head start thanks to his materialism—he loves his picture of Sammy, Frank and Dean and recording of “Sin-aught-truh” songs—a best friend and a grandmother (Nan, perfectly portrayed by Alison Steadman) who laughs and displays earnestness and grave concern for his health in all the right moments. None of this—Robert’s moral ambitiousness and support—keeps his darkest interior voices at bay. Anyone with a shred of self-esteem and an ability to introspect knows and grasps why.
What follows is the “boy band” touring gay bars, a sadistic manager who goes for profit by rules, not by reason, stomping in syncopated, percussive rhythm on a street in London—bursting with vibrant color and light in the most arresting scene—with Ashley Wallen’s athletic, stop-motion choreography culminating in a triumph of commercialism with a record deal. As in The Greatest Showman, also choreographed by Wallen, capitalism is idealized, stylized and portrayed as gilded and glamorous.
Having seen Better Man more than twice* to test and affirm my thesis—and enjoy the festive encapsulation of coming to terms with what can bring you to the brink of suicide in the company of my best friend, who’s been in life’s trenches with me—I can only recommend that you see Better Man in the spirit of how it’s made. Entering the movie theater—or pressing play on the remote control—with the slightest snark or cynical attitude will doom the cinematic experience.
Beautifully, evocatively filmed and reminiscent of 2019’s best movie, Rocketman, Robbie Williams performs one of Hollywood’s most profound scenes (ala A Star is Born) melding fog, murky waters and the extremely rational and human tendency for suicide in “Come Undone.”
One of the hallmarks becoming Michael Gracey‘s movies (and I’ve only seen two of his movies) is cinematography attuned to and aligned with philosophical and psychological insight into loss, pain and grief. The scenes and sequence of this hyper-realistic, stylized plunge into addiction could be used as an inspiring incentive for the addict to seek to overcome. Whatever the film’s flaws, and I’ll get to its other flaw, Better Man enshrouds the audience with music and pictures of the will to live, thrive and be understood. As little boy Robbie sings in the beginning, this is the struggle to know, to be loved and to understand—“real love”—in a world of stoicism, avoidance and confusion. “Come Undone” dramatizes in song and gloom the Protean desire not to come undone.
With allusions to sparks and drugs, Better Man gets better. In one of the best scenes I’ve seen in a musical film made in the past 60 years, Robbie at his most vulnerable meets a peer who’s the perfect match. The less said about this series of scenes, the better. But the woman he meets is his equal. She’s curious about life, seasoned about fame and ready, willing and able to love and be loved.
Is Robbie? For not nearly long enough, in glowing, wondrous scenes of lightness, glamor and romanticism—with candlelight, a mobile, a hospital, moonlight dancing and staircases, teak boat decks and curved, streamlined elegance—you want to believe that he is or can be. “She’s the One” (featuring Adam Tucker and Kayleigh McKnight) takes one’s breath away in its execution and makes the movie a singularly spectacular experience. “You deserve it,” Robbie tells the one when she strikes number one. Can he possibly mean it without his own conviction that he deserves it?
Be vulnerable and naked, Better Man soon displays, discovers and urges, to learn the answer. Guided by a life-affirming homosexual—the movie adores rational gay man—through death, rain and slaughter of one’s innermost self-doubt, the chimp Robbie sees within must realize for himself that the sun comes up whether he’s alive or not. Unevolved, on thin ice and in emergent need of recovery of his ego, the tenor comes to grips with reality in an arena of aristocracy. Staging and profanity in the film’s last two words cut into the ending’s upswept showcase of the virtue of loving yourself exactly as you are—to croon and tend to those grotesque inner demons—and, in any case, Better Man’s an original and astonishing movie. The civilized man’s many parts and complications, including power in vulnerability, crest into an elevated climax. Light up your life, youth—this is what the better man must and does learn—and, while you’re here, put on a helluva egoistic show.
* I saw the film on New Year’s Day and, again, during an outbreak of wildfires when the AMC theater, downtown and city lost electricity in a windstorm and the movie blacked out before the audience was evacuated in an emergency. AMC offered passes, which I accepted. I saw the movie again last night while Los Angeles burned down.
