a movie review by: Warren Curry

Imagine if Scorsese's The King of Comedy or the Jim Carrey vehicle The Cable Guy took themselves completely seriously. The movie you're currently envisioning is something along the lines of Mark Romanek's One Hour Photo. This material might have played well as dark comedy, but the film, incredibly, is completely devoid of any irony, making it fall deep into the realm of the worst kind of comedy: that which is unintended.

Robin Williams plays Sy Parrish, a middle aged man who works (and takes his job a little too seriously) at the photo lab in a Target-type retail store. Sy is an isolated person who we learn is obsessed with what seems like the perfect upper middle class family, the Yorkins. Nina Yorkin (Connie Nielsen) is one of the lab's best customers, and Sy happily develops her pictures of suburban bliss, which include Nina's successful husband Will (Michael Vartan) and her nine-year-old son Jake (Dylan Smith). Sy is so smitten by the photos that he even keeps extra prints for himself, which he's arranged in a bizarre wall-sized collage in his apartment.

Sy's infatuation with the family intensifies until he transforms into a full-fledged stalker. During this process he uncovers secrets about the family, which reveal the Yorkins' lives to be anything but ideal. Apparently angered by the destruction of what he views as familial perfection, Sy is moved to lash out at the perpetrators of this deception.

The writer/director Paul Schrader labeled the archetype of characters like Sy Parrish "the existential antihero." For these types of characters to succeed there must be a thorough exploration of their motivations, which can usually be helped by including a dash of back-story, and that is nowhere to be found here. Maybe Sy Parrish is just a "weird guy?" Fine, but there are lots of "weird guys," and I don't feel they deserve to have movies made about them. Romanek only delves into Sy's psychology far enough to be able to use it as a tool to place the character in the center of uncomfortable situations. Why is Sy so engrossed with the Yorkins? Romanek never gives us an answer (unless I'm supposed to read between the lines in the vague first half of the speech that Sy delivers at the end. If it's as simple as the on-the-nose reasoning he gives in the second half of said speech, then it's not earned at all) other than, "Hey, Sy's weird, and that's how weirdos behave, so let's all gawk at the weird guy being weird."

Aside from the horrendously off-the-mark central character, Romanek's screenplay has "run-of-the-mill Hollywood thriller" stamped all over it. His directorial eye is also totally obvious, whether his camera is panning away from Sy in his apartment to reveal photos of the Yorkins or the hammy close-ups of the man, designed to depict his lack of mental and emotional balance. Williams' serviceable performance is made very cartoon-ish by Romanek's sensationalism. When Sy is eventually pushed past his breaking point, the first thought that sprung to my mind was, "No! Mork's gone crazy!"

Sy's "existential antihero" never warrants empathy and fails to flesh out into anything of interest. He comes off as nothing but the creepiest (and most annoying) of people from the start, and when you're unable to invest a single thing in this character, the holes in the script become that much more glaring and inexcusable (for instance, Sy's room service ploy in Will's hotel. Dear Mr. Romanek: Rumor has it that the latest developments in hotel telephone technology actually allow for the establishment's employees to be aware of the location of an internal call when answering a phone). By the woefully anticlimactic ending, the whole film has devolved into a big painful joke.

Move over Signs, there's a new sheriff in town. One Hour Photo is now officially my reigning "worst movie of the summer."

Connie Nielsen Photograph

Michael Vartan Photograph

Robin Williams Photo