By Sandra Hall
PIECE BY PIECE ★★½
(PG) 93 minutes
Batman did it. Now it’s Pharrell Williams’ turn. In putting his story on screen, he’s turned to the world of Lego. I suppose you could call Piece by Piece Lego’s first musical biopic.
Pharrell Williams stars in director Morgan Neville’s Piece by Piece. Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features
Missy Elliott, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake and the rest of Williams’ friends and collaborators are all here, meticulously rendered brick by brick to produce a kind of reverse Barbie effect. Barbie was a toy made human, Pharrell and Co are transformed into toys, as if they’ve fallen down a rabbit hole a la Alice and landed in Wonderland’s neighbouring province, Legoland.
The result is a curiosity – a biographical documentary packaged up with a degree of colour and movement expressly designed for the short attention span. The soundtrack is stuffed with hits but you’re not given the chance to settle into any of them. It’s also well stocked with platitudes and you are given plenty of time to mull over these. Too much time.
The narrative line is wrapped around an interview with Williams, who has much to say about the importance of following your dreams and feeling free to rebuild your life if the first version hasn’t turned out quite the way you wanted it. This, he adds, is why he’s resorted to Lego. He sees it as the perfect metaphor for this philosophy. If your life’s architecture doesn’t suit you, take it apart and re-make it, piece by piece.
We begin with his childhood in project housing in Virginia Beach, remembered as a magical neighbourhood where he first got together with his lifelong collaborators, Chad Hugo and Shay Haley. He and Hugo would become the Neptunes, writing material for Justin Timberlake, Snoop Dogg and Gwen Stefani before joining with Haley to form the rap-rock group N.E.R.D.
Piece by Piece is a curiosity – a biographical documentary packaged up with a degree of colour and movement expressly designed for the short attention span.Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features
Williams was a self-described “odd child”, so mesmerised by music that it had him seeing stars – a fantasy realised by director Morgan Neville as an excursion into a Lego variation on the cosmos, full of spinning Lego orbs lit by kaleidoscopic flashes of astral light. It’s pretty but not particularly enlightening.
The narrative livens up when we get to the time he spent writing for other recording stars. The Lego rendition of the formidable Snoop Dogg and his entourage got a big laugh at this point from the audience at my screening. Snoop Dogg was one of the many artists whose careers were enhanced by the Williams touch.
Such was Williams’ success behind the scenes that it took him some time to convince the record producer, Teddy Riley, that he was ready to perform his own music. And when he finally did, he suffered a crisis of confidence that cost him more time before he finally emerged as a solo artist.
It all left me wanting to know about the mechanics of his music-making and the way he worked with the cavalcade of performers and musicians bouncing across the screen to Lego time. It’s a very hyperactive movie and the speed of its delivery, together with its childlike pitch, means that it fails to do justice to an extraordinary – and occasionally controversial – talent.
Piece by Piece is in cinemas from today.
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