One Hour Photo (2002)
psychological thriller
directed by : Mark Romanek
featuring : Robin Williams - Connie Nielsen - Michael Vartan - Gary Cole - Dylan Smith
running time : 1 hour 35 minutes
Funnyman Robin Williams steps out of character in this tense, low-key thriller that marked the feature-film directorial debut of music video veteran Mark Romanek. Semour "Sy" Parrish (Williams) runs the photo processing department at a large discount store; Sy is dedicated to his job, and takes great pride in his work. Sy's favorite customers are Nina and Will Yorkin (Connie Nielsen and Michael Vartan), an attractive and cheerful young couple with a nine-year-old boy, Jake (Dylan Smith). Sy dotes on the Yorkins and their son whenever they drop off film to be processed -- something they've been doing quite often ever since Jake was born -- and Nina and Will are indulgent of Sy's attentions, regarding his as a harmless eccentric. What the Yorkins don't know is Sy is a desperately lonely man with no real life of his own, and he's been obsessively making copies of their photos, for years, imagining himself to be "Uncle Sy," a member of the family. Sy's tenuous hold on reality begins to collapse when he develops a roll of film brought in by a new customer that suggests Will has been unfaithful to Nina; the notion that his ideal family may be falling apart is troubling enough for Sy, and when he loses his job, Sy reaches the breaking point. One Hour Photo was screened in competition at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.

Almost laughable in its straight-faced, antiseptically designed seriousness, the talented music video director Romanek's big-screen debut aspires to be a suburban-anomie retelling of a classic voyeur thriller like Peeping Tom, Psycho or Taxi Driver. Unfortunately, it's closer to the yuppies-in-danger subgenre of the 1980's, but with new-age apologias standing in for those films' pulpy shocks and bloody horror. Romanek earns points for his meticulous mise-en-scène: the well-meaning menace "Sy the Photo Guy" (Williams) works in a pristine cathedral of consumer goods called SavMart, and the tortured young marrieds played by Nielsen and Vartan live in a Frank Lloyd Wright-styled home that would make the editors of Architectural Digest blush. But the director's attention to detail actually works against his script's supposition that there's something rotten at the core of this affluent alternate universe. With its clean aisles and sans-serif elegance, SavMart looks more like a socialist wundermall than an indictment of capitalist dehumanization, and Neilsen and Vartan's neverending parade of runway-ready coiffures seem tailor-made to their Deepak Chopra-inspired homilies. Add that to Williams' distinctly non-threatening hangdog demeanor -- culminating in a so-what anticlimax followed by a pat explanation for his relative "madness" -- and what's left is a patchwork art-student thesis film with little to say about alienation, consumerism, or family dysfunction.