Pharrell Williams’s life … only it’s Lego. A fun idea – like Muhammad Ali in Etch-a-Sketch or Harry and Meghan with Thunderbirds puppets. This is a film that is boisterously childlike, surreal and eager to please, but also (I couldn’t help thinking) a strangely wrongheaded attempt to use Lego graphics to tell the remarkable, complex story of a brilliant musician and producer. Try as I might, I couldn’t make friends with this much-acclaimed film.
Piece By Piece is of course inspired by the amazing success of The Lego Movie franchise but doesn’t have those films’ crazy ironic knowingness or comedy stylings. On the contrary it is a basically heartfelt approach to Williams’s story, using real voices on the soundtrack but with Lego dramatisations of episodes in his life, as well as Lego dramatisations of one-to-one interviews with director Morgan Neville. The Lego Movies took cartoony fictional figures and endowed with them with an uncanny humanoid depth, but this seems to be doing the opposite: taking the very real intelligence and nuance of Williams and flattening them out, transforming that handsome, charismatic and sensitive face into something Lego-generic, with the C-shape Lego-hands disproportionately big and all 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 pre-emptively comic attempt to vanilla-ise his image? At the beginning and the end, Pharrell ponders the feeling that the universe and our consciousness of it is a huge Lego set, an array of prefabricated entities and emotions that we can only rearrange … but that this is liberating, because it lets us change what we don’t like. That could be true.
The film starts with Williams’s childhood in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and his teen years at Princess Anne High School, where his band the Neptunes were discovered by producer Teddy Riley at a talent show and propelled to greatness. It’s a fascinating story, and the scenes showing Pharrell’s globally triumphant track Happy can’t help but be gripping, with the wonderful lyric about clapping along “if you feel 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 around the track Blurred Lines.
There are strong moments here, chiefly the Legoised rendering of the glittering ocean and shoreline, where Pharrell will periodically contemplate his future in moments of doubt. The Lego Pharrell is an intriguing, absurdist high concept, but not nearly as interesting as the real thing.
