August 23, 2002

Dark exposure

Robin Williams shows his sinister side in the well-crafted thriller, One Hour Photo

by BRUCE KIRKLAND, Toronto Sun

SPOILERS!

One Hour Photo is the first, the last and most certainly the best in Robin Williams' trilogy of dark, twisted films.

It's first because it was filmed before Death To Smoochy and Insomnia.

It's last because it is being released third -- primarily because writer-director Mark Romanek is an exacting perfectionist who searched for a year for just the right tone.

And One Hour Photo is best because Williams has distilled a lifetime of loneliness, angst, sadness and repressed, yet savage, anger into his modest role.

Williams, transformed physically with a wispy hairpiece and a pastel store uniform, plays the head clerk at the photo processing counter inside a suburban mega-pharmacy.

Because the community is middle- to upper-class, the clientele is comfortable and smug. Williams' character, the pasty-faced and obsequious Sy Parrish, is thus in a lower class. If anyone notices him at all, they remember him less. Lives intersect but only for a service provided.

Sy has focused his attention on the collective lives of one particular family, whose photos he has processed for years. There is the mother (striking Connie Nielsen from Gladiator), the husband (Michael Vartan of TV's Alias) and their young son (Dylan Smith).

This is the ideal family Sy idiolizes to the point of possible criminal obsession. When he inadvertently learns something awful about them, something which might destroy the perfect family picture he has processed and etched in his mind, Sy begins to spin out of control.

At that fateful moment, this haunting, profoundly disturbing film, which is told in flashback, shifts into thriller mode.

Romanek made his first feature, Static, in 1985 and waited 17 years to make a second while doing his pioneering work in music videos for artists from Madonna to Nine Inch Nails, and he is too smart, too clever, and much too ambitious to make a routine, cliched thriller.

Working closely with Williams, who sublimely understands and communicates the psychological subtext of the story, Romanek has fashioned a major minor film.

No one expects One Hour Photo, with its arthouse content and subversive intentions, to become a $100-million summer blockbuster, but it is singular, original and refreshing, even with its gloomy mood.

With stripped down design elements, colours drained of their vividness, and harsh lighting which makes the store setting almost medicinal, Romanek and his filmmaking team have fashioned a visual masterwork that perfectly represents the story they are telling.

Robin Williams, with strong support from a fine cast, does the rest of the work. We cower -- and then marvel. The best was clearly worth waiting for.

(This film is rated AA)

© Toronto Sun 2002

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