The Safe House - Expositions

Sy "the photo guy" Parrish is a lonely photo developer who works at the local SavMart. He prides himself on the quality of work he does as he processes the film and prints that capture memories of other people's lives. "When we look through our photo albums, we're seeing a record of only the happy moments in our lives," says Sy. "No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget."

The problem with Sy (Robin Williams) is that he has no happy moments in his life that he wants to remember. But what he does have is an obsession with the seemingly perfect Yorkin family: Nina (Connie Nielsen); her husband, Will (Michael Vartan); and their young son, Jake (Dylan Smith). For almost 10 years, Nina has been bringing rolls of film to SavMart to be developed. On those rolls is the pleasant side of the Yorkin family--Nina's pregnancy, family vacations, Jake's birthdays. This is the life Sy longs to be a part of, and for every roll of film brought to the SavMart for processing, Sy has made an extra set of prints for himself. These photos adorn a wall of his lonely, spotlessly clean apartment, serving as some sort of shrine to Sy's vision of the perfect family.

Like a cross between Taxi Driver and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, One Hour Photo is a creepy journey into one man's madness. Awash in sterile whites and crisp, cold blues, the film starts with an unsettling sense of impending doom that never relents. The first moment you see Sy, you can almost hear the bomb that is ticking inside of him. It is clear that the cool, controlled way he carries himself is merely a fragile façade. It's not a question of whether he will explode so much when, and how bad it will be.

Williams, perhaps in an effort to distance himself from the zaniness of Mork and the schmaltz of Patch Adams, has lately been steering his career far from the family-friendly fare of his past work. One Hour Photo is the culmination of the reinvention project Williams started with Death to Smoochy and continued with Insomnia. It's also one of the best performances of his career. The character of Sy inhabits a world completely foreign to the characters in Williams' previous work. In other words, don't go expecting Mrs. Doubtfire.

Writer-director Mark Romanek makes an impressive feature debut, although his influence/obsession with Taxi Driver gets a bit too obvious at times (as does his fascination with paranoia thrillers like The Conversation). Romanek has clearly spent many hours studying the fatalist films of the '70s; One Hour Photo is probably as close to those sort of films as you can get in this era of politically correct filmmaking driven by test audiences. It won't ever be as good as those movies, but as it stands, One Hour Photo is an effective film that conveys Sy's potentially psychotic delusions without resorting to cheap laughs and twists of irony.

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