The Safe House - Expositions

as one of the saddest and most delusional creatures on earth: one Seymour (Sy) Parrish, a snapshot developer at the local SavMart, just down the cinematic street from Jennifer Aniston’s Retail Rodeo in The Good Girl’s Wasteland, Tex.

One Hour Photo, written and directed by Mark Romanek, provides not only a flashy acting vehicle for Mr. Williams, but also a haunting, profound meditation on the way photography has changed the way we think about ourselves. Our 19th-century ancestors, who lived in the time of the first daguerreotypes, perceived the change right away. As André Bazin, the great French film theoretician, once observed, the first crude black-and-white photos were not nearly as "faithful" to their human subjects as were color paintings—and yet people immediately preferred the photos, which they saw as imprints of reality, over painterly interpretations. It was not, they instinctively felt, a picture of Aunt Mary; it was Aunt Mary herself who was the object of your gaze. Indeed, Native Americans who believed that photos would steal their souls were not entirely wide of the mark, as the victims of our contemporary paparazzi can attest.

Sy loves developing pictures, because it enables him to share the happiest moments of his customers’ lives. He has become especially attached to a seemingly idyllic family consisting of a mother, Nina Yorkin (Connie Nielsen), a father, Will (Michael Vartan), and 9-year-old Jake (Dylan Smith), whom Sy has "known" ever since his earliest baby pictures. For Mr. Romanek, the name "Yorkin" is a play on the words "your kin." It’s the key to Sy’s emotional adoption of his customers, whose photographs he develops and then makes an extra copy of, to add to his living-room gallery of faces.

What begins as a seemingly harmless though obsessive hobby takes a dark turn when Sy discovers that there is trouble in the Yorkin household that, if left unchecked, will destroy the unity and sanctity of his favorite family. Gradually, Sy becomes a stalker—not for the usual lustful reasons, but to thwart an adulterous romance that threatens the "happiness" of the Yorkin ménage, Sy’s almost-decade-long ideal.

It is at this point in the film that the intrigue becomes too complicated for the sketchy characterizations to take hold. Sy is the only character we really know, and even he is something of a mystery. Why is he so alone, and why is his life so abnormally vicarious? At the end of the film, when he has seemingly gone too far in terrorizing Will Yorkin and his mistress, Maya Burson (Erin Daniels), he tries to explain himself to the authorities. But his suggestion that he’d been abused as a child seems tacked onto a plot that would have been better served by Sy’s remaining inscrutable.

There is also a gap between Sy’s lyrical sensibility, as he expresses the mystique of photography in the hyper-articulate inner monologues Mr. Romanek has written for the character, and the sad-sack social awkwardness Mr. Williams imposes on the protagonist. It’s no wonder that Eriq La Salle, who used to be so consistently headstrong on ER, seems merely confused as the detective assigned to listen to Sy’s tortured self-justifications. As for the human flies caught in Sy’s spidery photographic web, Ms. Nielsen, Mr. Vartan and Ms. Daniels try to flesh out their impossibly insubstantial one-dimensional characters with a touch of mannered exaggeration and stereotyping.

Still, there is much to commend in Mr. Romanek’s creative direction of his central concept, dramatically dubious as it turns out to be. A much-honored music-video and TV-spot director, Mr. Romanek seems to have the wherewithal to make interesting films in the future without relying too much on a single gimmick. In this instance, that turned out to be something of a trap.

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