Producer: Andrea Berentsen Ottmar   Director: Halfdan Ullmannn Tøndel   Screenplay: Halfdan Ullmannn Tondel    Cast: Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Endre Hellestveit, Thea Lambrechts Vaulen, Øystein Røger, Vera Veijovic Jovanovic, Assad Siddique, Patrice Demoniere and Loke Nikolaisen   Distributor: IFC Films

Grade: C+

“Armand” comes off like a film whose director doesn’t entirely trust his screenplay, and so feels compelled to add distracting surrealistic touches to it.  What makes that so odd is that the director and the writer are one and the same.  Halfdan Ullmannn Tøndel is a young man with an impressive ancestry: he’s the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann.  In this second feature, however, he seems to be trying too hard to live up to it.

The film is kind of a courtroom drama though the setting is a classroom in an elementary school with a malfunctioning fire alarm that might go off at any moment (though, surprisingly, little is made of that after the first reel).  The quasi-defendant is Elizabeth (Renate Reinsve), who’s called in for a conference about her six-year old son Armand.  He was found, she’s informed, in a closet with his classmate Jon by the school janitor (Patrice Demoniere), and the story Jon later told his mother Sarah (Ellen Dorrit Petersen) was that Armand had sexually assaulted him.

The boys’ young, nervous teacher Sunna (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) has been assigned to try to mediate the situation, but after an initial discussion brings no resolution, she’s joined by Principal Jarle (Øystein Røger) and his lieutenant Ajsa (Vera Veijovic Jovanovic), who appears to be the school counselor and the principal’s ombudsman, though her usefulness at the moment is diminished by the fact that she suffers from sudden nosebleeds at inopportune moments.  The final person in the equation is Sarah’s husband Anders (Endre Hellestveit); Elizabeth is a widow, her husband Thomas having died in a car crash.

Tøndel takes his time in doling out information about these characters.  Thomas, we eventually learn, was Sarah’s brother, and she believes that his death was a suicide rather than an accident, brought on by his fraught marriage.  Thomas was also an alumnus of the school whom Jarle still holds in esteem.  Elizabeth is a local celebrity, an actress who’s put a pause in her career to tend to Armand after her husband’s death but is notorious, and excoriated, for her flamboyance.  And Anders has a special interest in Elizabeth, though whether it’s ever gone beyond the affection of a concerned brother-in-law is unclear.  It’s also unclear whether Sarah suspects there’s something going on between them.

In fact much is deliberately left opaque about the relationships among the six people in the room.  What’s certain is that Elizabeth, who’s hearing about the complaints against Armand for the first time, is stunned but not about to take the accusations lying down.  Her behavior veers between understandably defensive and defiantly extreme—at one point she goes into a hysterical laughing jag over the accusations that makes everyone else uncomfortable (and probably many in the viewing audience, too). 

But the back-and-forth, which ultimately extends to threats to bring police and child protective authorities into the matter, does end in a quasi-revelation about what actually happened between the boys—even if, in an artsy mood, Tøndel chooses to set the final scenes in the school parking lot during a torrential downpour that drowns out any dialogue. 

Along the way, however, he indulges in sequences designed to accentuate the hallucinatory quality of what’s happening.  There’s that laughing fit, for example, and a conversation in which one character appears to be speaking to an empty space.  Weirder still are the dances—one Elizabeth performs in a hallway alone, and another in which she joins the janitor.  And then there’s an inexplicably erotic, phantasmagorical episode in which she’s pawed over and groped by the school’s teachers, who have been told of the charges against Armand by one of their own (Assad Siddique), in whom Sunna had unwisely confided.

All of this is intended, presumably, to reflect the psychological turmoil Elizabeth is going through.  And to an extent it works, although given the extraordinary quality of Reinsve’s performance, it feels unnecessary.  She invests the character with such steely, vaguely maniacal intensity that the artsy directorial tricks seem superfluous.  “Armand” isn’t a one-actor film—everyone around Reinsve is excellent, so much so that it would be invidious to single out one over the others—but she’s clearly the dominant figure. 

And what of Armand?  We glimpse him (Loke Nikolaisen) only fleetingly, as part of a children’s chorus in the school’s end-of-term show, and asleep in his bed at the close—but he looks positively angelic. 

The technical crew have certainly exerted every effort to realize Tøndel’s vision.  Mirjam Veske’s production design makes the school’s cavernous corridors feel like tunnels to Hades, and Pal Ulvik Rokseth’s cinematography, with its canny contrasts of light and shade, adds to the dour mood, as also do Ella van der Woude’s astringent score and Mats Lid Stoten’s eerie sound design.  One might criticize Robert Krantz’s editing as occasionally dilatory, but the tempo was, one assumes, the director’s choice.

“Armand” is, finally, one of those films one can appreciate more for its aspirations than its accomplishment.  But it demonstrates that Ingmar Bergman’s grandson has real potential. 

Producers: Paul Currie, Michael Gracey, Coco Xiaolu Ma, Jules Daly and Craig McMahon  Director: Michael Gracey   Screenwriters: Michael Gracey, Simon Gleeson and Oliver Cole   Cast: Robbie Williams, Jonno Davies, Steve Pemberton, Raechelle Banno, Alison Steadman, Kate Mulvany, Damon Herriman, Jake Simmance, Liam Head, Jesse Hyde, Chase Vollenweider, Frazier Hadfield, Tom Budge and Anthony Hayes     Distributor: Paramount Pictures

Grade: C+

Fairly early on in Michael Gracey’s biopic about pop singer-songwriter Robbie Williams, the director, choreographer Ashley Wallen, cinematographer Erik A. Wilson, production designer Joel Chang, costumer Cappi Ireland, editors Jeff Groth, Lee Smith and Spencer Susser, along with a large ensemble of singers and dancers, perform Wilson’s “Rock DJ.”  Supposedly set on London’s Regent Street to represent the triumphant success of Take That, the boy band that Wilson was part of from 1990 to 1995, the song wasn’t actually written until later (it was first released on one of his singles albums in 2000), but that doesn’t matter: it captures the excitement of the moment, and the number built around it, made to look like a single uninterrupted take, is fantastic—intricately constructed, exuberantly executed, brilliantly shot, and enormously entertaining.  If the rest of “Better Man” were half as good, the movie would be an absolute winner.

Unfortunately, it isn’t, following in narrative terms a pretty conventional, and awfully self-serving, trajectory of up, down, and up again, ending with Wilson becoming the better man of the title. But visually it makes one distinctly disorienting choice.  Williams doesn’t actually appear until the very end, though he narrates in voiceover throughout and sings, of course.  Until then he’s played by an actor named Jonno Davies.  But Davies is depicted as a computer-animated chimpanzee interacting with human actors.

The effect, accomplished by a team from New Zealand’s Wētā FX, is superbly done, every bit as convincing as what the firm managed in the most recent “Planet of the Apes” movies.  And after a while one gets used to it, and accepts that it’s a way of expressing Williams’ idea that he sees himself, before his late-in-life transformation, as having been less than human.  But though the point may be valid enough, over the course of two hours the means of making it feels increasingly like an affectation that loses its potency over the long haul, a stunt that runs out of steam.

And as it does so, you increasingly notice that stripped of the simian symbolism, “Better Man” isn’t much different from most movies about pop music stars.  And not appreciably better.  

It begins in the early 1980s, when young Robbie lived in a small town to the northwest of London with his parents Janet (Kate Mulvany) and Peter (Steve Pemberton), along with his loving grandma (Alison Steadman).  Peter, a would-be performer himself, teaches the kid to sing in the style of the greats like Frank Sinatra, but then abandons the family in search of a show biz career himself.  So the overarching theme will become Williams’ striving for his absent father’s approval and respect.

He auditions for a boy band, and his cheeky manner persuades creator-manager Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman) to team him with Gary Barlow (Jake Simmance), Howard Donald (Liam Head), Mark Owen (Jesse Hyde) and Jason Orange (Chase Vollenweider) in Take That.  Their success leads to bad behavior and drug use, which in turn cause his dismissal from the band.  He sinks deeper into addiction but finds salvation in a relationship with singer Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) and a songwriting partnership with Guy Chambers (Tom Budge).  But though his solo career takes off, he breaks up with Appleton after she aborts their child and is crushed when his grandmother dies; the film portrays his emotional collapse during his Knebworth concerts of 2003 in the form of a hallucination in which his various past selves battle one another in the stands.

That convinces him to change.  He goes into rehab and becomes the proverbial better man, reconciling with Nicole and apologizing to Nate (Frazier Hadfield), the childhood friend he’d broken with, as well as the members of Take That.  He visits his grandmother’s grave and even makes his peace with Peter, whom he invites to the stage of the Royal Albert Hall to sing “My Way” with him, coming to terms with the past personas he’d earlier battled at the same time.

The script by Gracey, Simon Gleeson and Oliver Cole fudges a good many details—the Royal Albert concert, for instance, occurred before Knebworth, and Peter didn’t do a duet with his son there.  But such reworkings of the record for dramatic effect are commonplace in biographical movies—if you’re interested in a documentary approach, try Joe Pearlman’s four-part Netflix series on Williams—and if the result has a clichéd and predictable arc, that’s not unusual either.

But Gracey does bring a lot of zip and cinematic pizzazz to the proceedings, albeit of that emptily flashy sort one encounters in a great many British pictures (Guy Ritchie, anyone?), and if it’s only the “Rock DJ” sequence that approaches what might be called real inspiration, the rest is energetic enough to please the audiences who embraced the director’s earlier musicals “The Greatest Showman: and “Rocketman.”  The performances are of a piece with his over-the-top style—exaggerated in the extreme—and by the close you might well think the entire thing a monstrous exercise of self-aggrandizement on Williams’ par (the chimp business even comes to seem a tactic to mitigate the grandiose redemptive arc he’s selling). 

But at least “Better Man” distinguishes itself from the usual run of pop music biographies with the monkey business, and it has that in its favor, though in the last analysis it’s not quite enough to make a movie about a guy who never really broke through in America all that compelling.