‘Piece By Piece’ review – a heartfelt biopic about the life of Pharrell Williams…in Lego | film

PThe life of Harrell Williams…only it’s Lego. A fun idea – like Muhammad Ali in Etch-a-Sketch or Harry and Meghan with Thunderbirds dolls. This is a film that is exuberantly childlike, surreal and eager to please, but also (I couldn’t help but think) a strangely misguided attempt to use Lego graphics to tell the remarkable, complex story of a brilliant musician and producer . No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get used to this much-acclaimed film.

“Piece By Piece” is of course inspired by the incredible success of “The Lego Movie” series, but it doesn’t have the crazy ironic wisdom or comedic style of those films. On the contrary, it’s a fundamentally heartfelt approach to Williams’ story, using real voices in the soundtrack, but also Lego dramatizations of episodes from his life, as well as Lego dramatizations of one-on-one interviews with director Morgan Neville. The Lego movies took fictional cartoon characters and gave them an eerily humanoid depth, but this seems to be doing the opposite: taking the very real intelligence and nuances of Williams and flattening them out to make that handsome, charismatic and sensitive face into something to turn Lego-generic, with the C-shaped Lego hands being disproportionately large and completely wrong for playing a musical instrument.

And why? To make his story more accessible and family-oriented, in keeping with his great masterpiece Happy? Or perhaps to create a protective layer of privacy around the real, non-Lego Pharrell? Or perhaps as a preemptively comical attempt to beautify his image? At the beginning and end, Pharrell muses on the feeling that the universe and our consciousness of it are a giant Lego set, a collection of prefabricated units and emotions that we can only rearrange… but that this is liberating because it allows us We don’t like to change anything. That could be true.

The film begins with Williams’ childhood in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and his teenage years at Princess Anne High School, where his band The Neptunes was discovered by producer Teddy Riley at a talent show and led to great success. It’s a fascinating story, and the scenes showing Pharrell’s globally triumphant song “Happy” can’t help but be stirring, with the wonderful lyrics about clapping along, “When you feel like happiness is the truth.” The subsequent description of his support for the Black Lives Matter movement is sincere – but the film is evasive about the issues surrounding the title “Blurred Lines”.

There are powerful moments here, particularly the legoized depiction of the glittering ocean and shoreline, where Pharrell regularly ponders his future in moments of doubt. The Lego Pharrell is a fascinating, absurd high concept, but nowhere near as interesting as the original.