Picture imperfect
>> Robin Williams gets nastier in the
so-so One Hour Photo

by MARK SLUTSKY

It’s an odd thing, for sure. As Robin Williams gets nastier, creepier and viler on screen, he somehow becomes more likeable. The man who had tipped the end of the saccharin scale with such dubious entries as Patch Adams and Mrs. Doubtfire, is now embarking on a career double back flip, taking on killers and creeps with glee. The results are great fun. He was believably excellent in Insomnia. Now he’s got mendacious obsession down to a T in One Hour Photo.

Too bad about the rest of the movie. One Hour Photo, while nicely shot and well cast, stumbles along like the most contrived of potboilers. Director-writer Mark Romanek has studied carefully at the school of Adrian Lyne, creating what could easily have been titled The Hand That Rocks the Photo Processor or Fatal Lab Technician. Call it horror lite, or fright by numbers, but this sub-genre has become fairly predictable, even by the standards of a genre that often trades on meeting our expectations.

Still, there’s Williams himself, who’s a treasure trove of ticks and obsessive qualities. Stuck in a Wal-Martesque superstore, he clings to old-fashioned values, like making sure those nasty snapshot machines he operates are properly set so that colours come out right. Lonely and more than a bit wacky, Williams soon finds himself falling in love with the perfect family, a man, his wife and child, whom Williams gets to know through their family pictures. (In true movie nutjob form, he makes extra copies of their photos and has them carefully pasted in a massive collage on his otherwise-barren apartment wall. This is a crazed-psychotic-killer cliché if ever there was one.)

In keeping with the Adrian Lyne thought process, Williams learns that all is not well in family-unit paradise. It seems hubby has been slutting about with a coworker, and this family-wrecking slut has had the audacity to take her photos to the very same lab. As virtually all mid-level-IQ household pets can now predict, this, along with termination of his job at the lab, push Willliams over the deep end.

Then there’s the race against time (I believe that’s also the name of a chapter in one of Syd Field’s screenwriting guides), in which the cops try desperately to figure out where Willliams is before he commits the ultimate act of evil revenge. Psychotic moralist that he is, Williams knows he’s on the lam, but can see utterly no wrong in his actions. He’s been lost in the 2-D world of photo processing for so long that he can’t grasp any moral depth or ambiguity in the universe.

Not an entirely bad ending follows, though Romanek dampens it all by attempting to offer a conclusive statement to police by Williams that borders on Dr. Phil proportions. Really, Williams is surprisingly great in this movie, proving he can take creepiness over the top. The filmmaker, on the other hand, has offered us nothing unexpected. :

One Hour Photo opens Friday, Sept. 13

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