One Hour Photo

Robin Williams has always been good at using his own persona, challenging our associations for effect. He leveraged his reputation for irrepressibly happy roles to create hugely sympathetic, often heartbreakingly tragic characters, such as in The Fisher King and the episode of Homicide: Life on the Street in which he guest starred. He's been in a fair number of duffers too, but you can't win them all.

So successful was the shift that he became typecast in this new part and is now slightly notorious for crying a lot. But, once again, using this image of him we had, he's moved into doing villains, carrying with him the sympathy and creating an uncomfortable contrast. Comedians often make good monsters (John Lithgow, Billy Connolly, John Goodman, even Michael Palin. But then Jim Carrey did play The Riddler that one time, so maybe it's just coincidence), but Williams carries with him that extra edge from his dramatic roles.

However, I'm not sure I would actually describe Sy the Photo Guy as a villain. He's several foodstuffs short of an outdoors feast, for certain, but he's almost too sympathetic to be seen as entirely dangerous or detrimental. I found myself actually rooting for the guy as he stalked a family. I didn't exactly want him to succeed, whatever that would have meant, but I didn't want to see him fail or break. The families characters are too thin for you to generate tremendous concern for their well being, and while what he is doing would be pretty damn disturbing in real life, the film has an element of fantasy to it. It's beautifully shot, and does a wonderful job of contrasting the vibrant world he craves versus the dour one he inhabits. But as pretty as this all is, it created a magical dream like edge, an absence of reality, within which a character who acts in much the manner of a fairy god mother, a guardian angel, who secretly looks out for them, made a strange sort of sense.

Indeed, there are only a small handful of scenes that fall outside and thus break this idea. If it were not for these and a soundtrack that is working the sinister angles throughout, I'm pretty sure it would work as a comedy. A train of thought helped onto the tracks by the presence of "Bill Lumbergh" as his boss.

While a bit of an issue if one wants to think of the film as the thriller as which it's billed, I'm glad (if a bit uneasy) that I saw it this way. I think the sympathy for the lonely creep was vital, if I'd viewed his as a wholly negative presence I think it would have been very dull and straightforward. Just sinister and little more. The conflict between a desire to see him achieve a positive outcome and the danger he definitely presents with a capacity to overreact made the movie, made it complex and it's use of context fascinating.