Review: One Hour Photo (2002, Romanek)
One Hour Photo (2002, Romanek)
8.5/10
Music video visionary Mark Romanek wrote and directed this supremely creepy and sparse thriller about a photo technician who fills his loneliness with a long-term delusional fantasy about the Yorkin’s, a family who are long-term regulars. I did not expect much going into this. I thought it would be pretty standard with a strong central performance. I was not expecting a film this minimal. Hell, it even has art-house sensibilities. There is very little plot; it functions entirely on observant scenes and a series of small developments which lead to Sy’s (Robin Williams) breaking point. We spend most of the film observing Sy just as he spends most of his life observing others. By the time Sy makes his discovery about Will’s (Michael Vartan) indiscretions, we understand how and why this effects Sy without ever being explicitly told.
I’d seen some of Romanek’s music video work and knew he had immense talent but damn can that man frame a shot. The standout feature of One Hour Photo (even more so than Robin Williams wonderful central performance) is the atmosphere that Romanek creates with the way he frames a shot and how he places Sy in his visual world. I consider myself to be moderately hard to creep out. I get freaked out by some pretty random and silly things at times but more often than not, it takes some effort for me to be genuinely unsettled by the feel of a film. The entire feel of this film disturbed me even more so than the hard to watch hotel scene at its climax.
There are a lot of elements that Romanek adds that could have been very obvious and ineffective. He places Sy in very bland art direction that washes him out and shows the emptiness in his life. He also shows Sy in countless shots that place him in literal overwhelming loneliness. So many filmmakers could have tried the same thing and failed. Effects like this are really difficult to pull off in a way that conveys what the director wants without making it seem clichéd or stale. I cannot stress enough how successful Romanek is at making all of this feel fresh. This really is some of the best directing in this genre that I have seen. Combined with the minimal and troubling score done by Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek, the result is hard to forget about.
One example of the director’s ability to make everything count really shines in a reveal that comes early on. Sy is sitting in his chair watching “The Simpsons”. As we hear the audio, the score kicks in and the camera slowly pans over to his wall which contains 9 years of Yorkin family photos which covers every inch of space. Again, this is a reveal that could have been mildly creepy at best but the pan, which is heavily influenced by The Shining, takes a standard and expected reveal and turns it into a profoundly unsettling moment. Then there is Robin Williams who really just takes this role and runs with it. He does not hide behind eccentricities. He simply gets inside the character’s head and allows himself to be minimal and restrained. He does not play him as someone who knows he is also the antagonist. He treats the character like a human being and not an evil person. This is where the success in his performance lies.
There are only a few complaints I have. The first is that I wish we had gotten to know the Yorkin family a bit more. While it keeps us more in Sy’s point of view, I would have liked to feel that Nina (Connie Neilsen) and Will had more development than they did. The last scene functions too much as the missing piece of the puzzle. The reveal during Sy’s confession explains a lot of his character but it might have been meant to explain a bit too much as the answer to everything. The reveal itself though is perfectly performed and the realization that comes with it feels like getting punched in the gut. Again, I wasn’t expecting much from this film. What I got was a film floored me with Mark Romanek’s ability to convey an atmosphere that is impossible to shake, a standout minimal performance at the center and a script that has a wonderfully anti-Hollywood sparseness to it.
Cinema is Truth
Cinema is Truth
Screen Adventure
good review !