ONE HOUR PHOTO (Mark Romanek, 2002) R

Reviewed: September 18th, 2002

One Hour Photo -- uncommonly engrossing, suggestively stylized and featuring the best work Robin Williams has ever done -- succeeds where so many other suspense films have failed by generating genuine empathy for its protagonist, Sy Parrish (Williams). Sy works at the titular one hour photo shop, an overqualified employee who takes his work very, very seriously. He's also oppressively lonely and dangerously obsessive.

A large portion of the audience's sympathy (as well as the film's overall success) stems from Williams's tremendous performance. There will always be the contingent of people who claim that a big movie star should never play a psychopath (hell, I used to be a charter member of that contingent), but Williams (who also delivered an affecting psychotic killer in Insomnia earlier this year) proves them wrong. While casting unknown-as-menacing figure means Tabula Rasa inspired mystery is working in your favor, obscure actors are often inexperienced and inexperienced actors aren't a fraction as talented as many of our biggest superstars (see: Edward Norton, Tom Cruise, Julianne Moore, Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman, Robert De Niro, etc. etc.). People forget these actors became superstars for a reason: they're not just pretty faces, they actually have massive, frequently underrated chops. Even when casting a villain, skill should ultimately beat out anonymity. I'll take a chilling yet very poignant Williams-as-psychopath over Michael Reilly Burke (incognito but unimpressive star of the recent Ted Bundy) as-psychopath any day of the week. Aided by light/resourceful make-up and hair work, Williams disappears so convincingly into the role of Sy you quickly forget you're watching Mrs. Doubtfire-as-lunatic.

Never underestimate the impact of a modest story extremely well told. One Hour Photo shares the basic plot of last year's excellent With a Friend Like Harry (purportedly genial man becomes obsessed with a casual friend and their family), while concurrently toning down the violence and amping up the subtly (though a portion of Sy's motivation is a little contrived). Concisely written and tastefully directed with bold, insidious imagery (rich coloring, onerous florescent lighting, Spartan dwellings, haunting collages, most horrifying dream sequence I can ever remember seeing) by music video/commercial veteran Mark Romanek (super rare nature of short-form rooted helmer penning his own scripts signals Romanek's real-deal status), One Hour Photo forces you to contemplate the marginal slave-wagers interacted with (and usually mistreated, however vaguely) over an average day. The output of bleak, high-quality character studies seasoned with thriller elements and sadness core has been close to nil since the 1970s, so grasp the opportunity One Hour Photo affords.

Addendum: Charles Taylor seems to have gone off the deep end in his One Hour Photo treatise (by the end I was half-expecting him to declare the movie the cause of world hunger), though the piece makes for a bizarrely edifying read (and he's absolutely right about the enchanting Connie Nielsen). The source of Taylor's fallacy is his belief One Hour Photo's about the sterility of American middle-class life. It's not. It's about a needy, melancholy guy. Taylor's overextending the alleged subject and themes and reach of Romanek's film, then faulting Romanek for not living up to that over-extension. How very unfair.

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