Piece by Piece

Grade: C-

I saw the Louis CK documentary Sorry/Not Sorry, but I ended up not doing a review for it, nor did I count it in my movie tally for the year. I liked it just fine, but it didn’t feel like I saw a movie. It was more like a feature length educational video. I will struggle to even get this article about Piece by Piece up to my four paragraph minimum.

It’s a documentary about Pharrell Williams, shown through the lens of LEGO animation. I know him from the song “Happy,” but he had previously been around long before that, with a career and collaborations that I was unaware of. Director Morgan Neville – who did the much better Fred Rogers doc Won’t You Be My Neighbor? – keeps Piece by Piece sanitized for a PG rating. When he works with Snoop Dogg, the smoke that billows around the studio is from something called “PG spray.” Overall, the viewer gets the feeling that some of the nitty gritty details of his life were left out, to keep everything safe and soft.

I enjoyed a couple aspects about it. Three shallow, vulturous record execs look exactly the same – like vampires, with black hair and pale faces. Also, animation can allow a filmmaker to create images or scenes that they couldn’t otherwise do with real people, places, and things. When Williams’s popularity is declining before his comeback with the release of “Happy,” friends and business partners see that it isn’t going well, and talk about “jumping ship” or “taking the last lifeboat while you can.” This metaphor can be brought to life with a scene at sea, where we are shown just that. How lame would that have looked in live action?

Other devices aren’t as successful. When these LEGO creations get teary-eyed and are about to cry (and it happens frequently), it looks like they have an extra pupil in each eye. All I could think about was The Substance, where the people who have injected themselves with that film’s namesake DO display a second pupil in each eyeball, as a clone grows inside of them. I can’t completely flunk Piece by Piece, because it is a nice story about a talented artist, and it has a good heart – and I’ve seen other movies this year that have really worked me up into a frenzy of dislike. But it’s a dull, standard, rise-fall-and-rise-again story, with the visual elements being the only interesting thing. It’s been such an afterthought, that I’m just now publishing this 5 days after seeing it. A boring-ass documentary is still a boring-ass documentary, LEGOized or not.

Grade: C-