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Do the Freak-Out
In The Last Kiss, you’re never the wrong age for a midlife crisis.
-Sam Adams

Screen Picks

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Continuing

repertory film

August 29-September 4, 2002

movies

Shots in the Dark

The reflect: Robin Williams gets answers with a question mark.

Robin Williams is an obsessive photo clerk in One Hour Photo.

One Hour Photo

by Cindy Fuchs

One Hour PhotoWritten and directed by Mark Romanek A Fox Searchlight release Opens Friday at Ritz Five recommended

“These snapshots are their little stands against the flow of time.” For 20 years, Sy (Robin Williams) has been the “photo guy,” working the Phototek counter down at the SavMart, meticulously calibrating the processor so all the colors on all customers’ pictures turn out just right. Day after day, hour after hour, he turns bits of film into memories, to be gazed on, framed, kept.

Sy himself lives a life devoid of hues, his pale orange hair just a shade darker than his sallow skin, his polyester shirts and dreary Sansabelt slacks blending into his white-off-white apartment. Timid and lonely, he obsesses over the photos he develops for one perfect-seeming family, the Yorkins (read "your kin"): Nina (Connie Nielsen) and Will (Michael Vartan), and their 9-year-old son Jake (Dylan Smith). Making extra prints of all their pictures, Sy covers his TV room wall with the Yorkins' history -- in the pool, on the slopes, at Christmas, Halloween and birthday parties. These photographs, pulsing with bright greens, vivid reds and sunshiny yellows, provide Sy with glimpses of what he's missing. And he imagines himself inside the pictures, Uncle Sy, posing all-smiles with Jake, mom, and dad.

Sy's imaginings are at the center of Mark Romanek's One Hour Photo. From the start, you know he's headed to a bad end, as he appears in a police interrogation room, questioned by the sober Detective Van Der Zee (Eriq La Salle, whose character is named for the Harlem Renaissance photographer). The rest of the film flashes back to show just how Sy gets to this dire point.

One Hour Photo complicates its mundane stalker plot by its own attention to composition, which mirrors but also refracts Sy's. The breaks from his perspective are not as dramatic as A Beautiful Mind's big change-up; rather, they sneak up on you. So, when Sy (imaginatively) lets himself into the Yorkins' home, dons Will's sweatshirt, grabs a beer and starts watching TV with the dog, the film gets you settled with him, and when the doorknob turns, you're suddenly feeling anxious that he's going to be found out.

Such moments are manipulative, setting you alongside the deviant character (though Sy's "deviance" is premised on his dedication to a mainstream ideal: the happy family). It's not only events that signify the workings of Sy's mind, but the composition of these events -- and in many cases, non-events, as threat builds, then dissipates.

The film's attention to both the artifice and meaning of images recalls Romanek's pre-feature past, directing some extraordinary music videos, including Nine Inch Nails' "Closer," Madonna's "Bedtime Story" and Macy Gray's "I Try." One Hour Photo is similarly meticulous and composed, simultaneously abstract and visceral. This attention to composition (visual, but also audio, through Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek's clever score) underlines One Hour Photo's focus: the "normal" structuring of experiences, in families, communities and individual psyches.

That Sy pursues his own projections and compositions so doggedly makes him an evident threat. (He finds himself investigated by a police department division called "Threat Management," not unlike Sy, concerned with preserving order). Here, the plotting gets increasingly awkward: a snippet of a fight between Will and Nina reveals their typically gendered tensions: she accuses him of "neglect"; he calls out her material grasping, her desire for a life that looks like "pictures in a magazine"; the boy frets in his bedroom.

Sy's discovery of a rift in the family comes just as his SavMart boss (Gary Cole) suddenly learns he's been making extra photos for nine years and fires him. Sy's order slips away: his action to restore it is as psychotic as you might expect, his "why-I'm-so-screwed-up" explanation to Van Der Zee as formally tidy as the shrink's summation in Psycho.

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But aside from these contrivances, and aside from Williams' continuing campaign to remake himself as the anti-Patch-Adams (not a bad ambition), One Hour Photo is deftly creepy. It takes you inside Sy's desperation, modeled on photos from catalogs and magazines, and more directly, on the happy family images that photo counters use to promote their services, images that ask, "Don't you want these memories to be yours?" And worse, "If they're not yours, what's wrong with you?" Neatly, ominously, the film composes a bleak vision of Sy's consumption of and by his culture.