August 23, 2002

One Hour Photo

Manic comic Robin Williams ratchets up the nasty quotient in last of his `dark-side trilogy'

by Peter Howell, Movie Critic

SPOILERS!

AA

Starring Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen, Michael Vartan and Dylan Smith. Written and directed by Mark Romanek. At the Cumberland.

Rating: * * *

Nasty, nastier, nastiest: Robin Williams was vengeful in Death To Smoochy, sinister in Insomnia, and now he's downright creepy in One Hour Photo. The third successive film in what the comic jokingly calls "my dark-side trilogy" finds him in Hitchcock territory, playing a man whose emotional isolation leads to a perilous fantasy of living someone else's life.

As Sy Parrish, the kindly operator of a retail mart's one-hour photo stand, Williams looks as if every drop of blood has been drained from his body. His pale skin, thinning hair and wire glasses make him almost invisible, an ironic aspect given the nature of his job. He is dedicated to making the best possible images of his loyal customers, who trust "Uncle Sy" with their most cherished photos. He takes his job very, very seriously.

"No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget," Sy reminds us, in a voiceover narration that seems ominous from the start.

His most loyal, trusting and photogenic customers are the Yorkin family: gorgeous mom Nina (Connie Nielsen), handsome dad Will (Michael Vartan) and winsome son Jake (Dylan Smith), who is 9 years old. Sy has been developing their photos for years, and has grown so fond of them and familiar, he knows their birthdays and vacations by heart. He buys Jake presents and occasionally allows himself the fantasy that he is actually part of the Yorkin clan.

The Yorkins are pleased to have such a caring man in charge of their mementos, especially since Sy has no family of his own. He lives in quiet solitude with his pet hamster, watching The Simpsons on TV and eating alone.

Unbeknownst to the family, Sy has done more than just commit their occasions to memory. He has secretly been making duplicate copies of their photos for his personal use. It seems a small eccentricity until the camera pulls back on a wall in his dingy apartment and reveals hundreds of Yorkin family photos, obsessively arranged and organized.

Our sneaking suspicion that all is not right with Sy is confirmed with sudden impact, although the Yorkins remain blissfully unaware. But Sy's life is about to come undone all the same: His supervisor (Gary Cole) discovers his clandestine habit of making and stealing duplicate prints. When Sy is unable to give a valid reason for the thefts, he is fired.

As he prepares to leave his post, Sy makes a discovery that pushes him even further over the edge: A set of photos left by a sexy woman shows her in compromising positions with Will Yorkin. The perfect family isn't so perfect after all, and Sy takes it as a personal affront. The moral order of his tiny universe has been shattered; restitution must be made.

Williams doesn't always succeed when he attempts to bury his manic nature, but his bland ambition here is fully realized. He is the all-seeing eye, the unforgiving lens in the photographic metaphor carefully set up by Mark Romanek, a former rock band videographer making an assured shift into feature filmmaking.

It would have been very easy for Williams and Romanek to push the character of Sy into monster mode, playing up all the worst aspects of his stalker mentality, or going the other way and making him a figure of pity and scorn.

They instead take the trickier but more satisfying approach of establishing cause and effect for his actions, allowing us to understand him even as we grow increasingly appalled by him. There is just one single scene, an explosive moment of rage, that seems out place with the careful mood of dread that the film establishes - a mood heightened by the tense electronic score by Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek.

The other characters in One Hour Photo aren't nearly as well drawn as Sy, giving the film at times the feel of a one-character play. But Williams makes that one character unforgettable, and no one who sees this movie will ever again take it for granted that photo shop employees couldn't care less about their pictures.

"The shutter clicks, the flash goes off and you stop time just in the blink of an eye," Sy tells us. Yes, but who is watching, and why?

© The Toronto Star 2002

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