One Hour Photo

Directed by Mark Romanek

Robin Williams might deny he's trying to save his career by playing unpleasant characters, but it sure looks that way from here. No matter how strenuously he defends the box office success of Patch Adams?and the less successful sentiment of Bicentennial Man, Jack, Jakob the Liar and their ilk?he still sounds like a man who's fessing up, a man who lucked into a lucrative racket, one that compromised his talents and calcified his image.

In interviews, he sounds a bit embarrassed to have let things slide for so long. But whatever Williams' motivation for turning in one nasty fringe characterization after another, the audience benefits. This year he's played a deposed, homicidal ex-children's show host in Death to Smoochy, a murderous novelist locked in a cat-and-mouse struggle with Al Pacino's world-weary detective in Insomnia and now a creepy photo developer in One Hour Photo. The first movie was rather poorly received by critics?black-hearted slapstick comedies usually are?but it's vivid, lively and low-down funny; in a few years, people might catch up to it, in the same way that they eventually caught up with Used Cars, Lost in America and other aggressive, abrasive comedies. Insomnia was of interest mainly for Pacino's layered, weathered, touchingly human performance; as his adversary, Williams was simply overmatched?in their big Heat-style duet scene on the ferry, Williams did most of the talking, but your eye was drawn to Pacino listening. Yet Williams still managed to take his hyperintelligent, messing-with-you-for-the-hell-of-it vibe a lot further than anyone could have dreamed possible.

As a pure moviegoing experience, One Hour Photo trumps the other two movies, not just because of the intense rhythmic and visual control exercised by its writer-director, Mark Romanek, but also because of Williams' performance in the central role. As Seymour "Sy" Parrish, the lonely, mild-mannered photo department manager at a Wal-Mart-style megastore, Williams has hunched posture, a clouded-over expression and close-cropped blond hair that emphasizes his pattern baldness, and he speaks more softly than he has in any movie since?well, probably since Good Will Hunting. It's easy to see why people would think him a harmless nebbish. That's certainly how the members of the Yorkin family?mom Nina (Connie Nielsen), dad Will (Michael Vartan) and elementary school-aged son Jakob (Dylan Smith)?react to Sy. They see him as a sweet loner who hands out free disposable cameras on customers' birthdays, who makes awkward, inappropriate jokes hoping to bond with people and who seems to be the only worker in this gigantic, brightly lit store who knows customers' names and addresses.

Sy's quietness?expertly modulated by Williams?belies a roiling interior. He's not a yeller. He's a fumer?the kind of guy who sits on anger for so long that he forgets how angry he is, then erupts one day for no good reason, shocking even people who've known him for years. Like Taxi Driver antihero Travis Bickle, he's sitting on a mother lode of neuroses, even psychoses, and it's only a matter of time before they well up and destroy everything he's built for himself. While violent, his explosion is more psychological than physical; it's more of an implosion, really.

Come to think of it, Taxi Driver would fit nicely on a double bill with One Hour Photo. First-time feature filmmaker Romanek is profoundly influenced not just by that 1976 classic, but by Scorsese in general?particularly Scorsese's commitment, almost unique among major American filmmakers, to showing you the small, telling details you never bothered to ponder. One Hour Photo tells you more than you ever imagined you'd want to know about developing photos for a retail conglomerate?and, more generally, about what it feels like to work for one of those companies during the new millennium.

Mike White and Miguel Arteta tried to do the same thing on a lower budget with The Good Girl, with limited success, but Romanek's film goes all the way, perhaps because its main character is as obsessive as the filmmaker; when we watch One Hour Photo, most of the time we're looking at the world as it looks (or feels) to poor, quiet, anal-retentive Sy. Sy is all about the rituals, the calibrations, the fine points of resolution and color temperature; he'd rather be hunched over his equipment than anywhere else on Earth. Jeff Cronenweth's camera gets close to the wiring, the chemicals, the gears; we see negatives being examined and cut, and watch prints being spat out of hulking gray machines.

Sy has also pondered the meaning of photography, particularly home photography. In quiet, lyrical voiceover, he notes that nobody ever takes pictures of moments they'd like to forget, and that to look at the typical photo album, one would think that life was composed mainly of joyous moments involving large groups of people. As a photo developer, Sy is allowed access into people's private worlds; he experiences their loves, their possessions, their obsessions. There's a young amateur pornographer who hands over his latest stash, then sidesteps his way out of the frame with a furtive expression; there's a woman who takes pictures only of her cats, and a young father who takes pictures only of his baby. All these pictures, Sy tells us, are important; photos are the things people save from house fires after they've made sure their loved ones are all right.

The film represents a rare merger of character study and cultural meditation; in its own unreal (or hyperreal) way, this film has serious things to say about the ennui and resentment lurking just beneath the surface of suburban life. As in Taxi Driver, the first half of One Hour Photo is mainly a visionary prologue, a throat-clearing trip into Sy's world (and Sy's head).

Romanek and his collaborators are all on the same page; they capture the monotonous fascination of Sy's world, and communicate a touch of his own obsession with getting everything right. (In an unnerving scene, he yells at the maintenance guy who fixes the developing machine because the blues are a bit off; when the guy says Sy is worrying too much over the little stuff, Sy's expression suggests he's disappointed in the whole universe.)

Romanek's other key influence here is Stanley Kubrick; tracking Sy through the store with a super-wide-angle lens, he emphasizes how life seems to flow around this man, and underscores the immense distance he feels from the rest of the human race. Romanek has a hard poetic sense of visual rhyme; a dream sequence photographed through an extreme wide-angle lens finds Sy standing dead-center in an aisle at the store, with the shelving units seeming to blast out of his torso like wings. The image echoes a transforming, winged robot toy he tries to give to little Jakob in order to curry favor with the boy and get closer to the Yorkin family. He's a man; he's a toy. Romanek says it in two images, without words.

Better acted than directed, and better directed than written, One Hour Photo doesn't quite come together. It wants to be a masterpiece and it just isn't. There are major narrative and conceptual pieces missing; it appears to lack (perhaps deliberately) a second act, so that when Sy explodes, it seems rather pro forma?like "Okay, he's supposed to lose it at some point, it might as well be here." The film's sinuous control is riveting at first, but after a while?as in some of Scorsese's and Kubrick's works?you start to wonder whether the filmmaker is mistaking his own fascinations for yours. (He probably is.) Still, in an age where composition, pacing and production design seem to mean less and less by the month, Romanek's total control of Sy's world can only be considered commendable. He puts the camera in a certain place for a reason, and cuts for a reason, and decides to score or not score a particular scene for a reason. He has an impressively cinematic sense of how to tell a story. When you're making movies, you'd better.