Starring Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen, Michael Vartan, Gary Cole, Dylan Smith, Eriq La Salle, Erin Daniels, Clark Gregg.

2002

“According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the word "snapshot" was originally a hunting term.”
-Narration from One Hour Photo

And according to Seymour “Sy” Parrish (Robin Williams) an antidote to the enigmatic nature of fleeting-time and its place within the fragility of life lies within the marvelous innovation that is the photograph. Sy elucidates that the all of life’s glories can be captured by photos and with subtle self-importance, poses himself on his masturbatory pedestal as film-gatekeeper. His obsessive philosophy is to the furthest extent, a self-congratulatory work, so much so that it becomes the center of his self-imposed vacant life, eradicating any excessive attachments. That the amalgamation of his bizarre fixation and his natural susceptibility for loneliness is a powder-keg in itself provides One Hour Photo with its most attractive premise and execution.

Essentially a suspense-thriller buried within the cerebral decadence of a psychological study, Mark Romanek’s One Hour Photo is the absorption of Taxi Driver with slick contemporary reference at a first-class apex. Without the vacuous sentiment of past Robin Williams exploitations this film takes the road less traveled in so many ways. Canonically the character palette is composed of terminally-clichéd cut-outs but surprisingly enough, they’re without most obtrusive traces of script-conformity and predictability, fleshing out interesting subjects, irreverent to the unwritten law that requires senselessness for characters of this variety. Ornamenting Romanek’s austerely surreal tableaux are these masterfully-drawn characters, as well as giftedly designed set pieces, fashioned as a sort of ethereal, porcelain Soccer-Mom Valhalla.

Though quite the opposite of the misogynistic and blood-lustful elements abundant in Mary Harron’s astonishing American Psycho there is a penchant for a similar style of self-disgust and contemplation amidst slickly affluent backdrops, the predominant color being white, encompassed within One Hour Photo. Romanek arrives on the feature film scene (though he has experience in the 1980s), after years of harvesting music videos [such as NIN’s classic Closer], demonstrating a fascinating perception of isolation and the burden of derangement, wrought by the maniacal hands of perversion and jealousy. In lightly-ostentatious, heart-thumping marathon prose One Hour Photo becomes an exercise in nuance, betwixt a perverse moral fable. However, without the pretentious simulation this psychotic meditation is, as it takes on an almost eerie otherworldly form and, again in the American Psycho vein, presents its protagonist in the shape of an allegorical apparition in his own autonomous but depressingly secluded realm.

Down at a Wal-Mart-like, commercialized hodgepodge (a departmental/grocery marketplace one level up from K-Mart) called Sav-Mart, at the one hour photo-development sector, the loneliest man in the world woos his customers with an unexpected kindness and uncanny obsession. This man is Sy Parrish (Williams, worthy of another Oscar) who, despite his sociopath-like persona amidst the customers, is a man consumed by excruciating solitude. In his lonesomeness Sy has taken to conjuring up a fantasy world in which he plays the role of “Uncle” to a seemingly perfect family of yuppie suburbanites, The Yorkins, his favorite customers. The wife and mother, Nina (Connie Nielsen, Gladiator), is kind to the personable photo man but thinks of him as just that, the affable one hour photo guy, and she reassures her worrisome young son, Jake (Dylan Smith), that he “must have lots of friends.”

But the Yorkins aren’t as perfect as they seem; the young patriarch, Will (Michael Vartan), is emotionally detached from his family, which he blames on his work, though he’s actually fooling around with a subordinate cooz-bag on the side. Sy, whose apartment wall is entirely devoted to “unauthorized” secret copies of photos of the Yorkins, begins to slip deeper into a state of nervous uneasiness and he begins to further “stalk” the family, and boldly if I may say so. But when in trouble at work with his boss (Gary Cole) Sy’s depression and obsession overcomes his mind and he sees fitting, to set an injustice right.

There’s this common mentality that average viewers often take to when watching films such as One Hour Photo, about slightly deranged protagonists, that calls for them to immediately feel distanced from that central character, whether they’re bubbly social butterflies never with a moment of loneliness or not, often determines this. But either way, if they like the film, most will decide that they don’t like the character much, and for the trivial reasons: that he’s quixotic and in a sense, downright capricious. However, don’t feel discouraged from seeing One Hour Photo for if you can’t relate, the movie is still an intoxicating journey of heartfelt performances and suspense.

Though the much-maligning sense of plot contrivances and conveniences is slightly blatant, never does Romanek let the viewer lose the necessary attendance that calls for melancholic dread and heart-aching malaise. Under his whimsical yet disturbing milieu Romanek arranges a multi-faceted subtext devoted to similar concepts explored in stark dramas like Taxi Driver, but here it’s applied to a wholly dissimilar exterior surface. And in his frames Romanek positions a maniacally brilliant union of art and location, drenched in drably effervescent lighting poised throughout remarkable architectural design.

And in the pure Taxi Driver fashion Sy envisages himself, not quite a savior, but as an intervening force appropriate in dealing out a much-deserved punishment of humiliation. The difference between Sy and Travis Bickle is the brutal nature of Bickle’s marine training and, of course, the elements of treacherous, evil beings, that propels Bickle to enforce his brand of vigilante justice. Here, Sy is a delicate, emotionally shattered shell of a man, barely coping with his own personal and harrowing demons, which Williams expresses in, perhaps, a scene of his career zenith. The heartbreaking finale calls for Sy to unconsciously open his tarnished soul, reveal his traumatic past and reach redemption, finally slipping into a permanent state of fantastical dreams and hope.

Rated R

* * * *

(August 27, 2002)