SAVAGE CINEMA'S BURIED TREASURE #7: "ONE HOUR PHOTO" (2002)

As a piggyback to the previous two installments, this latest Halloween edition of the Buried Treasure series spotlights the first feature from filmmaker Mark Romanek and starring the inimitable Robin Williams. Enjoy!

"ONE HOUR PHOTO" (2002)
Written and Directed by Mark Romanek

"Creativity comes from limits, not freedom."
-Jon Stewart, from a 2010 interview with Terry Gross

As I ruminate over the lengthy career of Robin Williams, I think the above statement could not be any more apt. Williams has proven himself endlessly to be one of the sharpest, funniest comedic minds on the planet and velocity of his quips could give viewers whiplash as we all attempt to stay aboard the speeding train of his creative energy. Yet, as an actor, I have long felt that he works to the finest of his enormous talents when he has parameters, boundaries and is placed under a certain level of control. The first time I found myself feeling this way was while watching Director George Roy Hill’s 1982 adaptation of Author John Irving’s The World According To Garp. Yes, I had loved him as a kid while watching “Mork and Mindy” on television and I was more than a bit bewildered throughout Director Robert Altman’s musical version of “Popeye” (1980) but this film was something different.

With his aforementioned roles as an alien and a cartoon character, Robin Williams, while hysterical, often felt otherworldly. In “The World According To Garp,” he strikingly became all too human with the same types of quirks, foibles, failings and ambitions we all hold for ourselves. And he was remarkable. He convinced me completely that he was this imaginative and sometimes temperamental novelist, househusband and devoted Father caught in an absurd, violent world not (entirely) of his making. To utilize a musical term, Williams hit all of the proper notes to express this peculiar view of humanity and when I finally and lovingly read the novel many years later, it seemed obvious to me that Robin Williams was the only choice to play this legendary fictional character. There seemed to be no filter between the words in the screenplay and his embodiment of those words. He breathed life and energy into every moment and after this beauty of a performance, I only wanted more of this depth from him.

But back to this issue of exerting parameters and boundaries upon such an excellent, unpredictable and at times, exhaustively unhinged talent. His comedy features have sadly and undeniably produced many, many terrible motion pictures where filmmakers obviously did not have the basics of a firm screenplay to keep him grounded and essentially waited for Williams to just appear on-set and “be funny.” His dramatic features (or features that straddle the fence between comedy and drama) have also fallen into the same traps. For every film like Paul Mazursky’s “Moscow On The Hudson” (1984), Fiedler Cook’s “Seize The Day” (1986), Barry Levinson’s “Good Morning Vietnam” (1987), Peter Weir’s “Dead Poet’s Society” (1989), Terry Gilliam’s “The Fisher King” (1991), Gus Van Sant’s “Good Will Hunting” (1997), Vincent Ward’s “What Dreams May Come” (1998), and Christopher Nolan’s “Insomnia” (2001), we have been blasted with cloying, over-emotive and self-congratulatory and falsely sentimental garbage like…Tom Shadyac’s ”Patch Adams” (1998).

While Robin Williams is more than able to reach certain emotional territories that, at times, can be nothing less than crippling, he desperately needs the proper limitations to guide him there. For this latest installment of Savage Cinema’s Buried Treasure, I turn to one of his very finest performances in Writer/Director Mark Romanek’s debut feature, the queasily disturbing thriller, “One Hour Photo.”

The simple plot of “One Hour Photo” could happily exist as a standard Lifetime movie network thriller and thankfully, Romanek brilliant transcends those trappings. Williams descends and dissolves into deep, and very dark waters as Seymour “Sy” Parrish, a solitary film developer in the WalMart styled department store named “SavMart.” Over the course of the film, Sy ingratiates himself and grows dangerously obsessed with the Yorkins, a suburban Los Angeles family (portrayed by Michael Vartan, Dylan Smith and the stunning Connie Nielsen) who have developed film at the store, under Sy’s meticulous care, for many years.

What Williams achieves, through the strong guidance of Romanek’s tight, perceptive screenplay and stylishly grim direction, makes the film even more chilling as we are often finding ourselves sympathizing with this character who could be unimaginatively and solely portrayed presented as a demonic being. A short sequence where he strolls through the Yorkin’s unoccupied house, taking in the life and family he does not have for himself, provides the perfect blend of empathy and creepiness, for instance, and it is through moments like this where the film shows us its higher ambitions.

In addition to delivering a film of unquestionable intensity that does provide a few shocks, “One Hour Photo” is a film whose reach extends beyond the thriller aspect towards a cultural observation. It is an exploration of loneliness and isolation and how those emotions play out against the idea of the “perfect family” whose cracks are unseen publicly. It is also a study of our collectively increased separation in a digital world that is ironically intended to bring people together. In many ways, the film may even be suggesting that even if our psyches are not as fragile as Sy’s, we are all becoming isolated from each other.

“One Hour Photo” also explores one man’s devotion to his work and how that devotion also defines a life. Yet, as that devotion is challenged and threatened, under the guise of technological progress, we see how that stress of becoming obsolete contributes to irrevocable psychological damage. The film is smartly places firmly in the age when traditional film made the cultural transition to the digital era, thus making a developer like Sy a relic. His fears of becoming irrelevant and even more insignificant than he already feels provides the story a level of pathos that Williams plays effortlessly. Thorough and painstaking in the detail of his work and craft as a developer combined with the pride in the energy and care he places in each person’s private photos collectively gives him the self-perception of being somewhat of an artist. The very type of artist that just does not exist in an accelerated, instant gratification world.

Sadly, the film he develops distributes unending sorrow for Sy as the worlds inside all of the photos are constant reminders of the richness of life he does have for himself. Sy Parrish is cut from the same cloth as other cinematic loners such as Travis Bickle from Martin Scorsese’s extraordinary “Taxi Driver” (1976). He is the classic misfit. A man who is constantly out of step with the times and his environment. He possesses weak social skills beyond basic customer service and photography serves as a lifeline. He is organized to the point of fastidiousness, wears the same beige colored clothing each day, returns to an empty home each night to a barren apartment, save for a television and a room containing an entire wall of years worth of developed photos depicting the Yorkin family. Once technological advances and the disintegration of his self-control intervene, he threatens to lose the ability to devote his life to his craft as well as losing his only connection to the world itself. Robin Williams brilliantly, subtly, empathetically and disturbingly conveys all of the emotions of this man’s splintering psyche alongside his wounded and all-too open heart, making for the type of thriller that is consistently unnerving and will definitely burrow under your skin with uneasiness and dread. Such is his mastery when given the proper control to how it is unleashed and it is a testament to the excellent collaboration between actor and filmmaker.

“One Hour Photo” was originally released to enthusiastic critical reviews and a modest box office and while it does show up on cable TV from time to time, it doesn’t appear to me to have taken on a larger pop cultural significance. A significance this film truly deserves. For this Halloween, along with Michael Mann’s “Manhunter” (1986) I am glad to offer you two high minded yet troubling and disquieting features that will definitely urge you to keep your house lights on long after you have completed watching.