"Piece by Piece" and "Better Man"

"Piece by Piece," a biopic about Pharrell Williams, and "Better Man," a biopic about Robbie Williams each make a very bold artistic choice that ensure that they stand out from the crowd, even if the stories are very familiar.  "Piece by Piece" is an animated film that tells Pharrell Williams' life story entirely with stop-motion Lego pieces, and all the characters are Lego minifigures. Well, except Snoop Dogg, who is a Lego dog.  "Better Man" is more conventional, except that Robbie Williams has been swapped out with an anthropomorphic chimpanzee version of himself, created by WETA FX.  He still sings, dances, and has a drug problem, but he's a chimp.  Clearly, I had to write about these two films together.

It's been a common complaint over the past few years that musician biopics have been getting stale and repetitive.  I think what "Piece by Piece" and "Better Man" have each managed to do is to tell their stories with the visual language of films that are more bombastic, more attention-grabbing, and definitely more financially successful at the box office than your traditional biopic.  The "Lego" movies were part of the zeitgeist only briefly, but they have a very particular appeal and an innovative approach to animation that is a good fit for Pharrell Williams - who has been this overlooked but ubiquitous presence in the US music scene for twenty years.  Williams' life is not a particularly eventful one, so "Piece by Piece" focuses on his career and creative aspirations.  The bright, colorful Lego animation provides a way to visualize Pharrell Williams' creative process in some genuinely charming ways.  There are some drawbacks, like the minifigures being pretty bad at emoting, and sometimes difficult to distinguish from each other, but I thought the experiment was mostly successful.  

"Better Man," of course, is trying to evoke some of the aura of the recent "Planet of the Apes" films, since the character design and animation of the ape Robbie Williams is very close to the animation of Cesar and friends.  The conceit here is that Robbie Williams sees himself as an animal as he goes through life, though this is never explicitly spelled out in the film.  There are other fantasy elements, such as dream sequences, fanciful musical numbers, and Robbie having recurring visions of evil versions of himself appearing during performances, fueling his self-doubt.  The visions eventually build up to a big climactic action sequence that wouldn't be out of place in any recent superhero movie.  This all looks like it was a ton of work, and plays wonderfully onscreen.  However, "Better Man" is a very typical musician biopic when you just look at the underlying narrative, and it didn't help that I had never heard of Robbie Williams before watching this film, and was not familiar with his music.  It felt very much like watching "Rocketman," the Elton John biopic, except with none of the Elton John music that helped get me through the rougher bits of that film.

I prefer "Piece by Piece" to "Better Man," though I'd recommend both.  "Piece by Piece" is a messier, weirder film that feels more like a documentary than a biopic at times, incorporating interviews with other artists and Pharrell talking about his own work.  And in addition to having a yen for movies about the creative process, I just enjoy Pharrell's contributions to music more.  I'd pick the "Piece by Piece" soundtrack over the "Better Man" soundtrack in a heartbeat.  At the same time, it was truly refreshing to see a WETA ape character outside the confines of a "Planet of the Apes" adventure, confirming that a digital character has absolutely no trouble being the lead of a movie, even if it's not an action-adventure spectacle. 

An interesting wrinkle here is that both musical artists end up playing themselves in the film without really having to do any traditional screen acting.  This puts more of the burden on the special effects artists, animators, performance capture artists, technicians, and other below-the-line crewmembers than ever.  Directors Morgan Neville and Michael Gracey deserve a lot of credit for shepherding these films, and enabling their experimental impulses, but more than ever these movies are team efforts and couldn't exist without the collaboration of hundreds and hundreds of talented artists.            

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