Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Better Man
2024 · Michael Gracey · Better Man on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how no one in the film reacts to the chimpanzee. (staging)
Robbie Williams appears throughout as a photorealistic CG chimp while everyone else is human, and the film never explains or winks at the choice.
Payoff: The film builds its own version of the man rather than filming the real one. In the reading: Crystalline description. Deleuze calls an image that composes its own object rather than referring to a real one a crystalline description, which is this whole film.
Watch for a single unbroken shot moving down a crowded street. (camera)
The Rock DJ sequence travels with a growing crowd of dancers along a shopping street in what plays as one continuous take.
Payoff: The number is the film's confidence trick: if this can hold together, so can the whole conceit.
Watch the human actors talk to the chimp like he's ordinary. (performance)
Steadman and Pemberton play scenes with the ape exactly as they would with a person, never once breaking the illusion with a reaction shot.
Payoff: Their belief is doing most of the work of making you believe it too. In the reading: The gest. Deleuze borrows the term gest for a bodily attitude that shows a relation instead of stating it, exactly what these actors are doing.
Notice the shift from drab kitchens to neon stage lighting. (light)
The film moves visually from a working-class Stoke childhood, plain and unglamorous, to the saturated neon abstraction of pop stardom.
Payoff: The palette tracks his distance from where he started, long before the story says so.
Listen for which song plays under which moment in his life. (sound)
The soundtrack reworks Williams's own catalog and maps specific songs onto specific life events rather than reproducing them as concert footage.
Payoff: Familiar hits pick up new biographical weight every time one lands on a scene.
Once you have seen it
Watch how many versions of Robbie appear in the Knebworth scene. (staging)
At his biggest show, the staging surrounds him with an army of alternate versions of himself, turning the stage into a battlefield of self-loathing.
Payoff: The enemy on stage was never a crowd. It was every version of him he has hated. In the reading: Dream-image (onirosign). Deleuze calls an image untethered from any datable memory a dream-image, and the multiplied selves at Knebworth are exactly that kind of vision.
Notice what the film chooses to show after the collapse. (structure)
After the addiction and self-destruction, the film moves toward a recovery coda treated with real skepticism rather than easy uplift.
Payoff: The ending offers self-acceptance as a possibility, not a guarantee, which is a harder thing to stage.
Listen for Williams narrating a body that is not his own. (performance)
He supplies the singing voice and narration while Jonno Davies's captured performance and Wētā's animation build the body on screen.
Payoff: He is telling his own story from outside the body telling it.
Carry this in: Watch the humans, not the ape. Their belief is what makes the whole conceit work.