Monthly Archives: August 2015

  • One Hour Photo

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Mark Romanek (2002)

    Sy (Seymour) Parrish has been taken into police custody.  The detective who interviews him refers to some photographs from the crime scene (‘they’re not pretty pictures’) and asks what on earth did someone called Will Yorkin do to displease Sy so?  During the next hour (One Hour Photo runs a trim ninety-six minutes all told), we find out.  Sy, a fiftyish bachelor, works as a technician in a one-hour photo developing unit in a Los Angeles SavMart.  (There’s a chain called ‘SaveMart’ in the US:  the ‘e’ has been dropped, presumably so that any resemblance to actual commercial enterprises living or dead is purely coincidental …)  Worryingly perfectionist in his work, Sy is completely alone outside it.   The Yorkins – or at least Will’s wife Nina and their young son Jake – are regular and favourite customers at the photo developing clinic.  Favourite is putting it mildly:  we soon discover that the only decoration in Sy’s barren apartment is a mural – a whole wall covered in photographs, which chart the Yorkins’ lives since Jake’s birth nine years ago.   Sy is now so desperate that he starts to translate into borderline stalking his obsession with this family – a family that he dreams of belonging to.  He goes to watch Jake at soccer practice.  He sees a Deepak Chopra book in Nina’s bag, buys himself a copy and, when he follows her to a cafeteria, produces it at just the right moment to keep conversation with her going a little longer.  He parks his car outside the Yorkins’ home and goes inside, helps himself to a beer, sits on the toilet, settles down to watch TV:  then the family returns.  They’re not shocked or angry; Jake calls out ‘Uncle Sy’ and the sequence is revealed as a fantasy, as the camera cuts back to Sy still in his car, on the outside looking in.  An audit at work reveals a large shortfall in takings (because Sy develops an additional set of the Yorkins’ photos for himself every time).   When his boss fires him, the implications for Sy of losing his job are devastating – from the point of view both of activity to fill up the day and what occupies his mind after hours.  One of his last customers is a young woman called Maya Burson:  Sy develops the film she brought in and looks at the photos.  They reveal that Maya is having an affair with Will Yorkin.  By the end of this very bad day at the office, Sy’s real life and fantasy life have both imploded.

    You can guess what happens next but one of the strengths of One Hour Photo, from an original screenplay by the director Mark Romanek, is that you’d likely guess wrong.  (Or maybe not:  you might think – after the opening scenes at the police station – that the film can’t be as predictable as it looks set to be.  I suppose I thought that but, of course, couldn’t predict what happened instead.)   Sy puts Maya’s photos in the envelope that the Yorkins are about to collect (Jake’s pictures from the free-gift camera Sy gave him for his birthday).  There’s an immediate reaction to the photos on the car journey home but, parked outside the house as usual, Sy is horrified to see the family eating their evening meal as if nothing had happened.  Next day, he follows Will Yorkin and Maya Burson to the hotel they’ve booked into.   Pretending to be room service, he gets into their room and interrupts their love-making.  He threatens the couple with a knife and gets them to pose naked, pretending to have sex, while he photographs them.   Then he leaves them, traumatised and humiliated but physically unharmed.  When the detective eventually lets Sy see the photos from the crime scene, it turns out they’re ‘not pretty’ in a much more literal way than we understood.  There are shots of the hotel room and the en suite bathroom but there’s nobody in sight.   (According to Wikipedia, the director’s cut includes footage which does show the pictures of the lovers in the hotel room.  The studio strengthened the film by removing this from the released version.)

    One Hour Photo, which has no sub-plot, isn’t a major film but it’s absorbing and, all in all, much better than it might be.  Mark Romanek does some things well – particularly in showing how what are (to the other person involved) minor social interactions are a big deal to Sy.   (It’s a pity, though, that Romanek allows both Connie Nielsen as Nina and Erin Daniels as Maya to be too facially responsive in their visits to the one hour photo unit:  they give Sy something to cling to and we don’t get any sense of discrepancy between what we see and what he sees.   A chance meeting with Will in a different part of the supermarket works much better in this respect.)  There are a few good ironies – Sy’s holding the adulterous husband at knifepoint saves, or at least prolongs, the family that Sy has idealised (even though the bit when Will returns home chastened and Nina gives him an OK-I’ll-forgive-you look is too pat).  Romanek uses the ominous music by Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek deceptively and effectively – it suggests a standard creepy-psycho story rather than the sympathetic character study that One Hour Photo turns out to be.  There are weaknesses too, though – in both the direction and the plotting.  Some of the latter are minor.  If Sy’s been taking extra sets of photos for years, why hasn’t the takings issue arisen sooner?  We know Nina does more shopping than Will thinks they can afford but how many family photos can you take to explain such frequent visits as she makes to the Savmart unit?  Other things can’t be excused as dramatic licence:  who took the photographs of Will and Maya that she brought in to Sy?  And if Sy is confident that exposing Will’s infidelity through those photos will be enough to end the marriage (he’s appalled when it isn’t), why does he pick up the knife from the store?   Nina is so shocked by the photos that she nearly drives off the road on the way home yet by supper time she’s composed and next day she’s bitterly resigned to the affair.

    Sy’s voiceover imparts some familiar stuff on the philosophy of photography – as evidence that people were happy, that they stopped time in the moment the camera recorded, etc.  More striking – in the way it fuses his solitude and his obsession – is Sy’s looking through assorted photos at a car boot sale and later presenting to Nina as a picture of his mother one of the snaps he picked up there.  But Romanek makes a mistake in having everything appear clinical-cum-other-worldly.  The visual scheme (Jeff Cronenweth did the photography) works well in shots of the supermarket going to sleep and waking up next morning, and in a sequence in an underground car park through which Sy makes his escape after the hold-up.   (The soullessness of the long, empty hotel corridors is more clichéd and less effective.)  Romanek overdoes the emptiness of Sy’s apartment and, in doing so, includes details that don’t add up.  When he comes home in the evening, we see a lonely plate and bowl in the drainer at the sink:  the point is made but the pathologically tidy Sy would have washed and dried and put his breakfast things away before going to work.  He shares his miserable life with a hamster – another screen pet designed to establish the emotional poverty of a character’s relationships that then gets forgotten about.  I ended up worrying what happened to the hamster after Sy had been arrested.   In the closing interview in the police station, Sy discloses that, as a child, he was on the receiving end of a photographer with pornographic intentions who assured him, as Sy tells Will and Maya in the hotel room, it was ‘all just pretend’.   The revelation that Sy was abused in this way seems a loss of nerve on Romanek’s part, not only trite but redundant.   We accept that Sy is the way he is because he’s desperately isolated – no further ‘explanation’ is needed.

    Robin Williams gives a much more satisfying performance than you might expect as Sy:  this isn’t a case where an innately and distinctively dynamic performer, portraying someone who spends his life being not noticed, looks merely to be suppressing his natural qualities.  Williams doesn’t shrink physically either.  Sy’s walk – every movement seems cautious, as if he’s not quite sure of the steps – is both deliberate and weightless.  His shapeless clothes, whether at work or at home, give him a physical presence that’s undeniable yet amorphous:  you register a bulk rather than a body.   His bleached appearance and strong blue eyes make Sy a little too noticeable – at first anyway; otherwise, Robin Williams is convincingly, arrestingly inconspicuous.   It’s easy to see why Sy adores the lovely Nina but Connie Nielsen overacts, not just in her meetings with Sy but in the scene when the son Jake, well played by Dylan Smith, talks worriedly about Sy’s loneliness.   Eriq La Salle is good as the detective questioning Sy:  his human decency never quite gets in the way of the cop’s professionalism.  Mark Romanek is anxious to make the husband a complete jerk (even after the affair’s been exposed, he kisses Maya ostentatiously as they arrive at the hotel).  It’s to Michael Vartan’s credit that he complicates the issue:  he gives Will enough callow charm, especially in his moments with Jake, to make you understand why Sy isn’t the only one fooled into thinking the Yorkins are a perfect family.

    18 November 2010

  • Frank

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lenny Abrahamson (2014)

    I spent most of Frank thinking I didn’t get it and I certainly didn’t get the references to real performers.  Lenny Abrahamson’s film is dedicated to Chris Sievey, who died in 2010.  According to Wikipedia:

    ‘Frank is a fictional story mostly inspired by Frank Sidebottom, the comic persona of Chris Sievey who is thought to have given his backing to the film before his death, but the plot was also inspired by other musicians like Daniel Johnston and Captain Beefheart.  Jon Ronson, who co-wrote the film [with Peter Straughan], was part of Sidebottom’s band, and the plot began as an adaptation of his writings but later became a fictional take on it [sic].’

    In the film, the deep-verging-on-mystical Frank is the front man of a rock group called the Soronprfbs.  Their unpopularity, along with their unpronounceable name, is a badge of their artistic integrity.  They go into creative purdah for a year in the Irish countryside to compose and record tracks for an album that no one is likely to buy:  the rent on their cabin in the woods is paid from the nest egg of Jon, a chance, emergency newcomer to the band, who’s an aspiring songwriter.  Jon gets involved when the current keyboards player tries to drown himself – unsuccessfully, but he has to spend a night in hospital and there’s a gig that evening.  (While they’re putting the album together, the band’s manager, Don, does kill himself.)  Jon starts posting videos of the Soronprfbs online:  in spite of their lack of talent, the power of the internet and the unpredictability of public opinion combine to get the group attention and an invitation to the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas.  The advent of what is, in their terms, conventional recognition and success brings about the band’s disintegration.  The end of the film sees Frank and three of the others sort-of back together but with the sadly chastened Jon leaving them to it.

    The mostly admiring reviews of Frank stress how brilliantly off the wall it is but – perhaps because it seems pleased with its ‘craziness’ – I found it monotonous and rather boring.   (If you want something truly crazy but grippingly coherent, funny and dramatic, read Stephen Sharp’s first-person account of schizophrenia in the ‘Diary’ section of the latest LRB.)  Frank is remarkable for the spheroidal papier mâché head the title character wears and for what Michael Fassbender manages to do while wearing it.  The head looks to be closely modelled on the one that Chris Sievey/Frank Sidebottom wore in performance but the Frank of the film wears it all the time.  (He also carries a spare, in which Don commits suicide.)   Photographs or replicas of the head are ubiquitous in the Curzon cinemas where Frank is showing and it may help the film to be a box-office hit (although we were two of only five people in Curzon Richmond for the late afternoon show yesterday).  The head certainly goes some way beyond gimmickry.  The clever camera angles manage to vary its look without (as far as I could see) actual changes being made to its features.  And thanks to the way Michael Fassbender reads his lines – these include descriptions of Frank’s facial expressions under the head – and moves his body, the character has expressive range.

    Jon – Jon Ronson’s alter ego? – is English; Frank, Don and the band’s ball-breaker theremin player Clara are American; the other two Soronprfbs are French.  Domhnall Gleeson does well enough as Jon:  you sense that the thinness of the role is tempting Gleeson to send the character up but this isn’t the problem it would have been with a less naturally likeable actor in the part.  I was sorry when Scoot McNairy’s Don took his own life:  McNairy manages to suggest a convincingly unstable personality.  Maggie Gyllenhaal isn’t given nearly enough to do in the repetitive role of Clara – she does plenty more than the script deserves.   Her height gives Clara a double hauteur and, when the Soronprfbs have fallen apart and Clara is singing in a bar with the group’s remnants, the bassist (François Civil) and drummer (Carla Azar), Gyllenhaal’s slow, solemn renderings of ‘On Top Of Old Smokey’ and Erika Eigen’s ‘I Wanna Marry A Lighthouse Keeper’ (the first time I’ve heard it outside A Clockwork Orange) made me smile.  Most of the pleasure I got from Frank was in the closing stages – Gyllenhaal’s singing, Michael Fassbender without the head (he makes Frank’s actual face another mask) and Tess Harper’s brief appearance as his mother.  After playing the woman who brought Jesse Pinkman into the world in Breaking Bad, Tess Harper seems to be cornering the market in nice conventional moms with engaging but problematic sons.

    14 May 2014

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