One Hour Photo
(2002)
review by Red Velvet Kitchen

Greetings and welcome to 'Wide Open Horror'. Tonight, following the success of last month's Lucio Fulci and Christopher Lee double bill, we will be dissecting Robin Williams and Mark Romanek. Literally. I'm sure you're all curious to see how many brain cells of theirs have eroded beyond recognition, if any of their intestines are twisted together like some unholy guts pile-up, or just how soiled their retina is. So, we proceed. Please hand me the scalpel. The brain is now exposed.

Unlike say Christopher Lee or Lucio Fulci who I can imagine have somewhere between an inkling and an onslaught of the dark stuff floating within their body/corpse, the collective force of Romanek and Williams are just too clean cut. What we see onscreen during One Hour Photo is the approximation of what they think people will find horrifying, saddening, disturbing, meaningful, important. When Fulci decided to insert a horribly large splinter into a pulpy eye in 'Zombie Flesh Eaters' I was immediately taken back to one of Andy Warhol's most famous quotes. The odd post-modern artist remarked that spectators shouldn't judge his work by how it looked, but by what kind of guy would want to display perfectly replicated cans of soup as art. We were responding to our response, if you see what I mean, trying to understand the mentality and the place that such a motivation would come from. This is the same with Fulci. That moment thrust me out of the flimsy narrative of the film world and straight into Italy circa 1940 where a little Lucio was probably a very intense young man. It threw me into production meetings and special effects tests for this movie. It plucked out my eyes and bowled them straight into wherever Fulci was when writing the first draft of his zombie opus. Who is this guy? Why would he want to cause so much explicit pain? And most importantly, why would he want to show it to us for fun? Same with Christopher Lee, I can really picture him transferring genuine darkness from himself to the screen, lighting it magnificently with his masterly darkness.

This idea is the biggest problem of the never-less-than-entertaining One Hour Photo, the horror elements and even the human parts seem more like indulgences in technique than evocation. They come from a desire to make a stylish movie about alienation, latent menace and modernity as dystopia, rather than making a film with all those themes that also happens to be stylish. Basically, the film wants to be an enthralling, probing piece of entertainment rather than a resonant document on human suffering and need. This may seem like harsh criticism, One Hour Photo is after all a film designed to entertain a mass audience, rather than summarise eloquently this universal sense of loss and detachment, but Romanek's film transcends this rebuttal, descending to the levels of make-believe as opposed to even glossy realism. In musical terms, compare the desperation of David Bowie's 'Low' or Lou Reed's 'Berlin' with the 'we sell you our sadness' angst of modern compromised bands like Limp Bizkit, Korn and Slipknot. Romanek's film is transparently theatre, and doesn't threaten the world waiting for you just beyond the red 'Exit' sign. You cannot enter the diseased mind of Robin Williams' Sy Parrish because he doesn't have one, we don't see him truly think, despair, worry or suffer. You can't see the world as a tragic reconstruction of our modern minimalistic melancholia because this world bleached of colours, repetitive and urgently nihilistic is merely a construct for this attempt at a disturbing truth. It is 'disturbing' as a fancy typefont, 'disturbing' as a particularly lurid expensive Halloween mask, it is designer disturbing. Mark Romanek also seems too in control, Williams' mundane madness is too precise and formal, the All-American family he threatens is too contrived a representation. These are not people you know, people who could threaten you, frighten you, get to you. These people are silhouettes of the real problems the film tries to stir up. It's never truly nasty, disturbing, violating or hostile. Only mildly disconcerting. Most upsetting of all though is that it's never truly sincere, the characters and world writer/director Romanek has created never mean anything beyond the limited universe of the film. Which is a great shame because One Hour Photo could have transcended what it actually is, a very watchable, moderately intelligent psychological thriller which eventually drives itself into a dead-end.

Like Memento and Fight Club, all you need to know about One Hour Photo before paying for your ticket is the great premise. It has that 'where do they go from here?' promise, and seeing novel concepts unfurl will always be one of the joys of cinematic invention successfully executed. So, Robin Williams plays loner Sy Parrish, a photographic developer at a local faceless mall. Seemingly normal, Sy has become obsessed with a rich, middle-class family who are regular customers of his, hidden behind that evasive but haunted smile of his. Every time they visit he makes an extra set of prints for himself to add to his mosaic-like collection of hundreds at home, and this obsession seems permanently at breaking point… That's all you need to know. The film is very much a work of modern horror, the monster being the tragic indifference between ourselves and the world we have created to make life more comfortable. The same beast used to devastating effect in Audition, The Man Who Wasn't There, Time Out and to an extent, Fight Club and Memento again. This film is to photo-developing guys what Taxi Driver is to the yellow cab brigade. And Robin Williams is very good, his face always an emotion just above what we know he is feeling. If he smiles uncomfortably, he is uncomfortably happy, if he grimaces, we can tell he's disgusted, if he looks sad, we know he is devastated. It's a very controlled and commanding performance, and never are you reminded of past cinematic crimes, the likes of 'What Dreams May Come' and 'Patch Adams' a universe away from this understated intensity.

In fact, One Hour Photo is very much like the most definitive facial expression that Robin Williams manages: The nervous grin. Now, I've always been wary of grinners because for me that always meant two things. 1. It strongly suggests something beyond that oddly ambiguous facial reaction. 2. It declares to the world 'Hey, I like you guys, but I'm really out of my depth here'. It is a sign of submission, of being supremely uncomfortable and ill at ease. So, One Hour Photo is certainly like the first point, nothing is ever as cheery, clear-cut or clean as it appears to be (literally and otherwise) and the film has a great visual style which has the deliberate feel of a cinematographer so technically proficient but lacking in human connection and compassion (like the protagonist himself). Humans are objects, objects are two-dimensional, everything is eerily placid, almost morbidly so, like the world died and this is the synthetically created replica. As for the second point, the film itself is about how uncomfortable humans can be when together (although it only indirectly addresses why) united only by the happy manipulation of the past through photographs of smiling loved ones at birthday parties, or their equivalent in contrived small-talk and obligatory greetings. However, looking at the film as a whole, this point again resonates. For all the consistent precision of every inch of the film, from the visuals to the narrative to individual set-piece construction, the film ultimately seems unsure what it's trying to say, and who it's trying to say it to. Like photographs, One Hour Photo seems to seek meaning from an audience rather than persuade or sublimely manipulative. It asks the questions, shows the evidence, but has no real idea of the answer, or the response. Post-screening I also got that terrible pang of 'what if?' in my brain. What if One Hour Photo made you truly empathise with the collapsing world of Sy Parrish, made you feel it too? What if Romanek were to challenge the emotionally dispassionate stance we often assume whilst watching cinema? What if this film were to truly care, to shake us into submission, deliver meaning through it's bleakness? Unfortunately, One Hour Photo is ultimately like one of those unflattering snaps of a handsome chap or beautiful lady; the goods are there but they're never properly captured. And this, not the unhappiness within, is what is most distressing.