One Hour Photo and two creepy hours with Robin Williams
“One Hour Photo” (2002)
Mid-way through re-reading “Robin” by Dave Itzkof I reasoned that I needed yet another obsession on top of all my others and with the nights of winter drawing in fast, cold and dark, I should re-visit the films of Robin Williams and second on my list was One Hour Photo. First and in pride of place was of course the 1997 Oscar extravaganza that was Good Will Hunting and a selfish opportunity, if nothing more, than to finally share that particular melancholic life affirming masterpiece with my son. All went rather well, considering, until I broke down in a sobbing mess. “Look!” I croaked, losing control of my voice as well as my tear ducts “He’s left his best friend without telling him! And exactly how his best friend wanted him to!”. By the culmination of the arguable trio of endings I was gone, sobbing uncontrollably, and barely able to look my son in the eye. This is nothing new. You should’ve seen me when we watched Dead Poet’s Society together a year or so ago! I was stood on my coffee table, tears like a waterfall, screaming “O Captain! My Captain!” long before, and indeed long after, Ethan Hawke ever does. I have Dead Poet’s Society scheduled in my unwritten list at number 4 and just a tick behind Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia at number 3. Maybe tonight too, a lucky 8th of November in the year of our Lord 2024. Any excuse to re-watch a Nolan film and one I’ve never overly liked let alone loved. Heresy I know and don’t worry. I’m in the same Christopher Nolan fan club as you are. But Insomnia isn’t very good even in spite of Robin’s brilliantly distant and psychopathically cold performance.
Much like One Hour Photo.
Directed by Mark Romanek, and 8 years before he’d rip my heart into pieces with 2010’s Never Let Me Go, One Hour Photo starts creepy and through Robin’s deathly quiet performance of obsessional psychopathy, continues in that disturbing, skin crawling vein throughout. The one major flaw in the film was something I hadn’t remembered before re-watching it and that was the setting for the photo processing booth and more importantly, its placement within the larger and brighter world of a chain supermarket. Only a short scene with colleague “Yoshi” (Paul H Kim) works. The rest, and especially the awkward interactions with supermarket boss “Bill” (Gary Cole) don’t, and feel inserted and forced into a film that could have definitely done without them and, had the film situated the booth in a singular, stand alone shop on a cold and dark high street, independently owned by Robin’s watchful yet coldly distant “Sy the Photo Guy”, maybe there would have been a more consistently unbearable tension that drains away under the bright lights of an outside world we don’t need to see. We have the hunter and we certainly have the hunted, as so brilliantly enacted midway through the film as Robin finally finds the home of his dreams and the beginning of someone else’s nightmare. That should have been the film’s only touchstone with the “real” outside world, artificially bright, open, friendly and welcoming, to the continual darkness of the cloaked figure leaving his small store by streetlight at the end of the high street. Regardless of my movie changes and ruminations Robin is simply magnificent, his smiles belied by the cold dead eyes behind his over sized glasses and desires to please, living a lie and a life of someone else in the artificial world of a photograph. Other people’s photographs.
One Hour Photo was the first of three movies Robin self-titled as his “triptych of evil” with director Romanek calling on the inspirations of Taxi Driver, The Conversation and The Tenant, a singular character piece on psychopathy and crippling isolation in normal every day society. Robin studied serial killers in his preparation as the character he would embody was created to become the much older, awkward, plain, quiet man with a deliberately shorn blonde hairline and large eyeglasses. Robin noted of his character in interviews at the time “the more normal and regular it seems, the creepier it is” with Elvis Mitchell in his review for the New York Times ebulliently stating that Robin is “so good here it’s almost painful to watch” and Roger Ebert, then of the Chicago Sun Times, writing in praise “Robin Williams plays Sy, another of his open-faced, smiling madmen, like the killer in Insomnia. He does this so well you don’t have the slightest difficulty accepting him in the role”.
Must go. I’m off to an Alaskan town where the sun never sets and Robin Williams is playing the evil bad guy again.
Until next time.
"At the end of a Storm" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.