Robin Williams Creepy Picture Movie

CREEP SHOW ROBIN WILLIAMS TAKES HIS TURN AS A STALKER, EAVESDROPPING ON A FAMILY'S KODAK MOMENTS

Review

One Hour Photo *** 1/2 (Out of four)

Rated R

Robin Williams and Connie Nielsen in Mark Romanek's creepy thriller about a photo tech who stalks a suburban family.

Opening Friday in area theaters.

His blond hair is close-cropped and immaculate. He wears powder-blue polyester Sansabelt slacks and shiny white-leather shoes with many buckles. When he gets to the mall Sav-Mart where he's worked for 20 years, he puts on the light blue vest of all his fellow Sav-Mart employees. He gives every evidence of feeling on top of the world.

He is, in his way, a dandy, an esthete -- one with terrible taste to be sure, but he's as coordinated in his dress and as finicky about details and basic esthetic matters as an Edwardian painter.

He is the store's photo tech, the guy who takes your rolls of film and, one hour later, gives you "the moments of your life" (as the TV commercial singer says). "Sy, the Photo Guy" is what he's called affectionately by six-year old Jake, whose development he's been watching on paper since Jake was a tadpole.

And that's the rub, of course. Here is an all-but-anonymous man who is privy to the most intimate and secret lives of large numbers of people. And if he should, out of his own personal wretchedness and loneliness, take a psychopathic liking to Jake's whole family as a seemingly special specimen of American family life. . .

That's the premise of Mark Romanek's very special thriller "One Hour Photo" in which, Oscar be hanged (for his maudlin touchy-feeliness in "Good Will Hunting"), Robin Williams finally -- finally -- gets to show the world his acting chops.

He's brilliant here as the photo developer. As with "Insomnia," there is immense power in his stillness and self-control simply because we have seen him go "full goose bozo" for decades.

Because his face is usually covered with sweat, kindly fake smiles or emotional overkill, we've never really seen it in close-up repose before the way we do in Romanek's film. It seems that when you just look at his face for a while underneath the large glass frames his character wears, it has a kind of pinched American crankiness. The eyes are a little too sharp and the corners of his mouth turn down. Ignore the fireworks we've seen emanate from that face; this is the guy who always stands up at town meetings and says that the taxes are too high and that all high school athletic and arts programs should be eliminated.

That suggestion of sharpness blends perfectly with the role and the way Williams carries it off -- this wildly errant little aesthete whose unguarded aesthetic manias extend even to the moral details of those whose lives he sees develop before his eyes.

"One Hour Photo" is a very tricky and creepy thriller. For the first half-hour, I thought this tale of the stalker photo tech was dramatically underdeveloped, as if strong enough dramaturgic chemicals hadn't been used. By the halfway point, I had the shock of realizing that here, incredibly, is a film of consummate restraint. It's in the performances, the plot and the storytelling itself.

There is only the briefest segment of bloodletting in the film and even that is a fantasy sequence from a dream scene.

Stalking is the crime that Hollywood has been telling us about repeatedly for more than two decades and for what should be the most obvious reasons: other than fraudulent bookkeeping, it's the crime Hollywood knows best. Every celebrity has been followed and forced to endure unwanted affection; most have been stalked; some (Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg, David Letterman, Madonna) have been stalked in a clearly lunatic and perhaps dangerous manner. Stalking is just the ambivalence of commonplace audience love/hate made manifest.

Ordinary TV tells us large quantities of stories like "One Hour Photo" every month. You've seen it countless times on "C.S.I." or one of the "Law & Order" shows or "Profiler" or, well, somewhere.

But not like this you haven't. Not with this restraint and, therefore, unpredictability.

You know that Sy's psychopathic interest in this one apparently idyllic family is going to come to grief. The whole film, after all, is a long flashback with Sy in police custody. What you wait to see is how it all goes down.

And that's where this movie fools you. It never goes down the easy road. The strongest audience reaction elicited by the entire film comes in the middle where we see, in a scene we don't yet fully understand, Sy prowling alone through the family's empty house, dropping his pants, and making himself at home in their bathroom. As one, the audience groans and laughs with disgust: this guy is really, really nuts.

Williams -- the real Williams -- is, in life, very much a kind of San Francisco aesthete himself, a product of the Juilliard School, a man of vast cultural reference. He's got this crazy Sav-Mart aesthete nailed -- the punctiliousness of a man equally overwrought by the errant colors coming out of his Agfa developer and by the untidy moral behavior of a husband and father he always romanticized. It's a very creepy performance, even more than the one in Christopher Nolan's "Insomnia."

And, best of all about the film, it absolutely refuses every cliche the plot seems to be rushing to. The movie's calculated restraint matches Williams' own.

Very creepy, and impressive.

One final thing: it's not perfect. A question to ask yourself when you see it: Who took the picture that finally sends Sy over the edge? And why? Sy develops a roll of film of two people romantically involved but there's no possible explanation of who took the most incriminating pictures or why the subjects would want so much evidence of inflammatory indiscretion out there.

It's the kind of tiny dramatic hole that the script-doctoring equivalent of Sy the Photo Guy would have known how to take care of.

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Robin Williams Creepy Picture Movie

Source: https://buffalonews.com/news/creep-show-robin-williams-takes-his-turn-as-a-stalker-eavesdropping-on-a-familys-kodak/article_a230f742-4fcb-50ca-a062-442f6deddd77.html

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