One Hour Photo
Full Price Feature
I don't use the word "taut" very often, thanks to poster-quoted critics' overuse of it with regards to psychological thrillers, but taut is the best adjective to describe this film. The pacing is slow but no time is wasted - every pause, every quiet moment, stretches the tension, pulls you into the story, forces you to pay attention. I will not be able to do justice to the visceral pull of this film. Some of it may well be my own personal convictions about preservation and photography and hearing them echoed in Williams' voice over tug at my insides.
All the filmic elements are tightly integrated, as if one mind created them. It should be no surprise that a film about a photo processor will have amazing photography in it; the real treat is seeing how it is used throughout the film. Light and color and composition engage you in an almost subconscious way. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth also lensed Fight Club and K-19, and his style is amazingly visceral. The production design team and gaffer drew lines between the cold fluorescent world of Sy's life, and the warm, magazine-shoot-perfect life of the Yorkin family. The art director and production designer previously worked together on The Cell, which, for all its faults, was a visually arresting film. It is nice to see them use their powers for good this time. Composers Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek have created an unnerving score, which I felt was like a negative, somehow - thin and backward and unexpected, but also building at just the right moments. It breathed with the film.
Robin Williams is Seymour "Sy" Parrish, whose life behind the One Hour Photo counter is quiet, dull, focused, and fluorescent-lit. His eyes and employee vest are the same quiet, flat blue. His manner is quiet, unprepossessing, and deliberate in all his actions. Things are not always as they seem, however, and as Sy points out, a collection of snapshots are only the cleaned-up version of a life. Knowing this, he still fervently believes in the perfection of other people, other lives, whose images pass through his expert hands in 60 minutes or less.
He endures a sea-change in this film, but never forget, this is a good man inside, a man who is very alone and lacks many fundamental cornerstones of a full life, but he can never be feared. He wants only the peaceful rest of familial love, nothing more. He has no idea how to get it. The filmmakers play with visual imagery to conjure up terror of this Seymour, anything as simple as a grown man speaking alone with a boy can (these days) automatically cause us to assume the worst. They want you to do this and they carry his character carefully throughout the story.
Williams himself, with ducks-down hair and bland expression, looks like a thin shell of the actor portraying him. As an actor, Robin has been bigger than huge and sappier than maple syrup, but even when he is playing vulnerable or helpless, he has an undercurrent of rage. Sy Parrish feels physically so different I literally had to concentrate to recall that this was standup comedian Mork smiling benignly through his glasses, longing for a life he imagines through the 4X6 windows allowed him at his job. It is as if he had his entire ego and super-ego extracted for this film. It is an impressive performance I will not forget for some time.
The supporting cast is good, Michael Vartan, Dylan Smith, Connie Nielsen, Gary Cole; but this is Robin's film. Amusing narrative winks at the audience do not interfere with the story: his name is Sy or Sigh, short for Seymour - ha ha, see-more, and he drives an Echo. Maxfield Parrish's paintings are of lyrically colorful, beauteous scenes of stillness and quiet, fairies and chivalry. He watches The Day The Earth Stood Still, stuff like that. Very witty but not distracting. I loved it.
-- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ These reviews (c) 2002 Karina Montgomery. Please feel free to forward but just credit the reviewer in the text. Thanks. reviews@cinerina.com Check out previous reviews at: http://www.cinerina.com http://ofcs.rottentomatoes.com - the Online Film Critics Society http://www.hsbr.net/reviews/karina/ - Hollywood Stock Exchange Brokerage Resource http://www.mediamotions.com and http://www.capitol-city.com
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