The Safe House - Expositions

Mark Romanek's second feature, "One Hour Photo," is a tight, tidy, sunlit little thriller - although its pervasive brightness and glare come not from daylight but from the harsh fluorescent lighting of one of those cavernous one-stop superstores called SavMart.

This is the primary habitat of one Seymour "Sy" Parrish, the nondescript middle-aged clerk who runs the store's photo-processing department. He's Sy the Photo Guy and he obediently practices the store's policy of remembering to "Check Your Smile."

Like Jennifer Aniston's Justine Last in the current "The Good Girl," Sy is one of those people we brush by regularly in our lives but barely notice, and SavMart is the same kind of deadening place as Retail Rodeo, the East Texas emporium where Justine works, only a little more upscale. SavMart is somewhere in Southern California and Sy's department, tellingly, stands apart from the rest of the store, near the entrance/exit, as if it were pushed aside there.

Its placement fits Sy, who has the demeanor of someone who has been pushed aside - and forced into involuntary isolation throughout his life. As a result, Sy almost isn't "there" - and Robin Williams, in a quietly bravura performance, plays him in just that way. Slightly slumped over and wearing his hair blond and closely cropped, his body seems to fade into the earth-color clothing he wears, just as his clothing seems to blend into the surroundings of SavMart.

He's negligible and, despite his territorial dedication to his work, not liked very much. His boss Bill Owens (Gary Cole) is constantly dressing him down and, in one scene, Sy leaves work only to find that someone smashed the windshield of his car with a rock - presumably one of his co-workers. There's something about him that bothers people even though he's polite and obliging.

The one time he does speak up - to the guy who repairs the photo developing machines for SavMart - it's startling. Owens doesn't laud Sy for his proprietary feelings and or his perfectionism, but instead reminds him that he should know his place on the store's food-chain.

In an amusing scene, Sy introduces us to his various regular customers, his favorites being the Yorkin family - father Will (Michael Vartan), mother Nina (Connie Nielsen) and little Jake (Dylan Smith). They're a "magazine layout" family that's into rampant self- documentation and is so perfect the dangerously solitary Sy projects himself into it.

He knows the Yorkins intimately through the endless snapshots he's developed for them. And, as it turns out, every time he makes up prints for them, he develops copies for himself, a habit that will come back to haunt him.

The movie is about how Sy goes from lonely guy to veritable stalker, becoming a misguided avenger when life begins to unravel for him and when the Yorkins prove not to be as happy as their pictures would indicate - snapshots that decorate a full wall of one of Sy's rooms at home, from floor to ceiling.

He overlooks his own observation - namely, that "no one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget" - and, consequently, comes to feel betrayed.

Williams absolutely nails Sy's queasy infatuation and overall strangeness, doing another variation on Rainbow Randolph, the deranged character he played earlier this year in Danny DeVito's "Death to Smoochy," and Walter Finch, the creep he played in Christopher Nolan's "Insomnia." Williams turns Sy into the most unsettling obsessive since Robert DeNiro's Rupert Pupkin in Martin Scorsese's "The King of Comedy" (1983).

But Williams isn't the only standout in the cast. Nielsen (who was so impressive opposite Russell Crowe in 2000's Oscar- winner, "Gladiator") turns in a performance less showy than Williams' but equally effective. Her subtlety - especially Nina's subtle response to Sy's progressively ingratiating ways - is what grounds the otherwise near-surreal film in some realism. Nina is a person we've all met before - a pleasant woman who is friendly up to a point but whose body language, mannerisms and facial expressions make it clear that any kind of familiarity with her is unacceptable. Her smiling but wary reactions to Sy's fawning and to his solicitations are wonderfully accurate, especially the look on her face when he obsequiously, creepily, refers to himself as "Uncle Sy."

Romanek is also a talent to watch - but not exactly a new one. Although neither he nor the studio seems to want anyone to know this, "One Hour Photo" is not his first film. All of the publicity touts Romanek's many accomplishments as a preeminent director of music videos (for such artists as Madonna, Nine Inch Nails, Fiona Apple, Beck, David Bowie, Michael Jackson, R.E.M., Lenny Kravitz and Macy Gray), but skirts his debut feature, made almost two decades ago. In 1985, he directed a nifty, equally surreal little thriller called "Static," starring Keith Gordon and Amanda Plummer. That film, worth renting, introduced elements that Romanek has come to realize more fully here.

Only an unnecessary and rather blatant coda mars "One Hour Photo." It's the concluding "explanation" scene that Alfred Hitchcock made so popular with "Psycho" (1960), a sequence which spells out Sy's motivations and tries to elicit empathy for the amount of damage he's suffered and done. In Hitchcock's film, this psychobabble was recited by a therapist. Here, Sy himself gives the monologue, and it undermines just about everything that Romanek has fastidiously built up, especially the disturbing mood.

Up until that smothering point in the film, "One Hour Photo" creeps along with as much twisted obsession as Sy himself, efficiently unnerving us.

Some things, we learn, are best left unsaid.

Rated R.
Grade: 3-1/2 stars

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