The Safe House - Expositions

The comic books of my childhood used to employ the written sound effect "Glorch!" to signify a violent lump in the throat. There's a kindred form of gulping sentimentality to the Robin Williams vehicles of the late '90s, but this century the star appears to have gone into career rehab—if not checked in for a complete Clockwork Orange makeover. Now a recovering glorchmeister, Williams tops his recent villainous turns in the comedy Death to Smoochy and thriller Insomnia as Sy Parrish, the kindly psychotic stalker of Mark Romanek's One Hour Photo.

A gnomish codger with close-cropped orange hair, Sy is the lonely photo guy in a Wal-Mart-type emporium. (Fox Searchlight, which released the similarly set The Good Girl two weeks ago, is evidently taking the lead in dramatizing the secret lives of America's retail proletariat.) Short and stocky, with an uncannily round head rendered all the more puppet-like by his tight-lipped smile, Sy is tentative yet stubborn. There's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight, Lon Chaney used to say. In a sense, Sy is sentimentality deranged. His mania is also a given. The photo processor is introduced as a criminal, being booked in a menacingly bright and antiseptic police station, where a cop informs him that his photographs are being used as evidence against him.

Pondering a portrait of his late grandmother, Proust described photography as a form of dismal reification—a pale reflection of life—and so it is here. One Hour Photo is nothing if not a concept film whose sci-fi totalitarian tone is immediately established. These efficient suburban law officers not only work out of a bleak Danish-modern station but represent a special "threat management unit." At least Sy's passion is genuine. His crimes arise out of his love for pretty suburban matron Nina Yorkin (Connie Nielsen). Or rather, he's in love with Nina's life—her successful husband (Michael Vartan), cute kid (Dylan Smith), devoted pet, fun-filled vacations, and palatial suburban spread—as recorded in the family snapshots that he processes with near religious devotion.

Taking his solitary meals in family restaurants and living his life surrounded by copies of other people's snapshots, Sy is a hapless seeker in a world of simulation, not unlike the androids in Blade Runner whose sense of their imaginary "human" past is predicated on the fake family photos they treasure. (Indeed, Sy rummages through flea markets to construct a record of his own history.) At the same time, the photo guy is presented as an industrial anachronism. Romanek lavishes close-ups on the printing process—Sy is a proud craftsman personifying the technology that links photographs to the preservation of memory and, later in the movie, to the proof of wrongdoing.

As the fastidious Sy takes it upon himself to correct a few flaws in his vision of idealized Yorkindom, so One Hour Photo has a deliberately alienated mise-en-scène, predicated on the fluorescent symmetry of Sy's workplace and the too perfectly lit exteriors of a happy Kodak ad. Romanek, a successful maker of music videos and television spots, knowingly directs his first feature as though it were a generic commercial. The Muzak blends into the actual score. The camera moves have an escalator glide.

Most commercial movies have a fear of subjectivity—witness the contortions that Signs must go through to establish itself as an "objective" supernatural doomsday thriller rather than an account of an individual crisis of faith. One Hour Photo, however, is essentially the story of Sy's breakdown as it is played out among the phantoms of the Yorkin zone. The movie's funniest, most tellingly narcissistic moment has Sy violate the sacred temple to discover his own photo affixed to the Yorkin family fridge.

Structurally, One Hour Photo is modeled on Taxi Driver, but as carefully repressed as Williams is, the full flowering of Sy's obsession lacks the scary abandon that Robert De Niro brought to Travis Bickle. Since his pathology is insufficiently motivated, Sy ultimately feels more like a presence than a character. (Romanek shows him watching The Day the Earth Stood Still on TV and presumably identifying with the aliens.) The creepiness might have been better served were Sy less the movie's centerpiece than an effect who is continually glimpsed popping out of the background.

Something like The Truman Show in reverse, One Hour Photo suggests that any nut with a camera can turn anyone else into the unwilling star of a private fantasy. (Filmmakers take note.) Romanek's movie is a bit too pat and pleased with its undeniable ambitions, but the setup resonates with quiet desperation. There's not a single vicarious glorch.

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