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