But while the film is based on Williams' life, it's best to think of it as a fantasy film. Director Michael Gracey previously turned PT Barnum's career into the gripping and ultra-popular musical film. The greatest showmanwhile glossing over or revising most of the reality of Barnum's life and work. While best man gets closer to the truth about Williams' story, it also plays with image and emotion over facts, particularly when it comes to music. Just as Gracey replaces Williams with an ape for a variety of reasons (more on this in a moment), she fictionalizes and expands her subject's story. Most significantly, however, it tells the story through fantasy sequences so bold, expressive and visually striking that the effects dominate the film.
Image: Paramount Pictures/Everett Collection
Actor Jonno Davies plays Williams throughout the film for motion capture purposes, as he grows up as a boastful, attention-hungry braggart in a tense working-class home. He gets his first shot at national fame as a teenager, when producer Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman) casts him in the massively successful boy band Take That. (Time later described the fandom around the band as “the '90s version of Beatlemania.”)
The usual behind-the-scenes drama follows: depression, substance abuse, arrogance and alienation, a rock bottom, a recovery and a rebirth. But the basic beats don't matter as much as the way Gracey depicts them, through brave sequences in which Williams and his cohorts travel through a spinning, mutating fantasy version of London's Regent Street, or with hordes of paparazzi looking like zombies attacking Williams underwater. in a set piece taken directly from AquamanThe trench fight.
best man is overtly built more around Williams' emotional experience of his life than around a sober reconstruction of its events: presumably he never fought 110,000 versions of himself in a bloody, over-the-top battle royale set to “Let Me Entertain You” . At the very least, timeline nitpickers may break out in hives over the way music from Williams' entire career is used to represent emotional moments from completely different parts of his story. But the full-throated fantasy approach allows Gracey to escape the usual awkward questions about fidelity to the truth in a biopic. When your protagonist is an ape operating in a human world, how could anyone miss that the approach has more to do with image and feel than factual accuracy?
That central conceit, of Robbie Williams as an ape-man among humans, gives Gracey plenty of additional visual appeal, but it also serves as a potent metaphor. He and Williams have given different reasons for this approach: in the film itself, Williams simply says that he has always seen himself as “a little less evolved” than other people. In other interviews, Gracey has talked about wanting to distance audiences from reality so they'll better accept the unreality of a musical, or simply needing a trick to avoid making another similar biopic.
And ahead of the film's release, Williams and Gracey released a video clip in which they offer an entirely different reason: Gracey says he was inspired by Williams' complaints about “being dragged on stage to act like a monkey,” and decided to do just that. . literal and tangible idea.
But apart from those justifications, presenting best manThe subject as a literal animal, a creature different from all those around him, allows Gracey to lean into Williams' themes of alienation and sense of separation. Whether the barrier is his bottomless hunger for attention, the way he struggles with drugs and alcohol while his boy band mates seem physically and emotionally healthier, the way his fame distances him from his family and former friends , or simply the way he constantly craves Seeking the approval of a father who is busy pursuing his own form of fame, Williams withdraws from the world. Framing the film around the most self-critical and instinctive version of his own image underscores the point in every shot, without the need for exposition.
And there is also a destructive and animalistic side to the ape image. Wētā FX, the effects house behind the Planet of the Apes films, gives Williams a believable, expressive chimp face and detailed chimp fur, but keeps his body language and physical form largely human. Still, there's an atavistic danger in Williams' moments of anger or fear on screen, as he beats his chest or bares his fangs. In these moments, he feels much more dangerous to those around him and much less in control than any human character.
All of this, plus the ambitiously wild musical sequences, leaves best man as a spectacle film worthy of sharing multiplexes and audiences with Wicked. It's apparently designed more for fans of immersive, Wētā-centric fantasy worlds, like the Planet of the Apes or Lord of the Rings films, than for fans of pop music history, or even Williams himself . (Netflix has a four-part documentary about Williams' life and career for those looking for a more fact-based approach.) In the end, viewers may be curious to learn more about Williams as a performer and personality, or to delve deeper into her discography.
But he best man The experience is more akin to watching a notable Bollywood musical or a Baz Luhrmann spectacular like Red Moulin! than to watch an episode of behind the music. Most musicals translate emotions into songs. This one goes a step further, translating the excitement into a daring central trick. It is experimental and explosive. Even for those who have not invested in Williams' work or have no prior knowledge of his career, it is worth watching just to see how Gracey fills the screen with energy and verve, with a fascinating staging designed to overwhelm the audience's senses. audience and ensure that they come out singing. .
best man It's already in theaters.