Taking
Pictures
by Sasha Stone
"If we were all in the movies, maybe we wouldn't be so bored."
-- Daniel Johnston
It can be a crushingly lonely world. We exist in parallel worlds. There's
reality, and there's generated and regenerated fantasy to sell us on
a kind of happiness. They're waiting in mail boxes on the pages of clothing
catalogs, they're between stories and on food labels - they are there
from the time we're able to recognize them, and will be there until
the day we die. They are everywhere. Most of us can tell the difference.
Most of us know that those smiling faces looking right at us are actors
and models paid to look happy. Most of us know that happiness is ours
to make or choose. But what of those who can't tell the difference?
They
end up being arrested for handcuffing themselves to David Letterman's
coffee table. They are shot while trying to hop Madonna's fence. They
are given restraining orders. Or else they lead lives of quiet desperation,
faithfully cutting out pictures and pasting them in a photo album or
on their wall. The photos, the commercials, the movies, the songs, fuel
an already rich fantasy life.
It
is from this idea that Mark Romanek's graceful, anguished meditation
on loneliness, One Hour Photo springboards. Robin Williams,
in the performance of his career, plays quiet, lonely Sy Parrish, a
clerk at the one hour photo in a vast megastore "SavMart." Sy has been
working there eleven years. He carefully calibrates the machine to perfection
so that the images it spits out can be the ideal he wants them to be.
Sy knows his machine. And he knows his customers. He knows that first
time parents go nuts with pictures. He knows that people barely look
at him when they drop their film off. He knows that some of these people
obsess on anal sex, and others do nothing but photograph their cat.
He sees it all, for better or worse.
He
has fixated on what appears to be the catalog-perfect family Will
Yorkin, his wife Nina and their son Jake (Michael Vartan, Connie Nielsen
and Dylan Smith). Sy has been developing their photos for six years,
and is so taken by them that he's filled his head with indulgent fantasies
about how he's not the faceless, invisible "photo guy," but rather "Uncle
Sy," their cherished relative. He tells us in voice-over that having
your picture taken is like saying, "I was here and someone cared enough
about me to take this picture."
When
young Jake worries about Sy, sensing his palpable isolation, his mother
reminds him in a sweet but lame way that they donšt know whether or
not Sy has friends. Maybe, she offers, he has a girlfriend and a mommy
and daddy who love him. Maybe. But Jake knows what we know: Sy has no
one. He has no faces - only the prints he skims from his customers.
Sy's
manufactured fantasies are shattered when they come up against his coarse
boss (Bill Owens) who feels it necessary to remind Sy of his place on
the food chain. This manager, of course, takes his own job a tad too
seriously, and seems as ridiculous as Sy. Isn't he wearing a uniform
too? Taking orders from a behemoth? Even so, SavMart doesn't appear
to have room for a wacko like Sy, and before long he gets fired. This
triggers, predictably, a burst of anger. Sy will either do something
terrible or implode. We worry for him, we worry for the Yorkins.
First
time writer/director Romanek, who made his reputation doing music videos
for Madonna and Nine Inch Nails, has delivered one of the most on-target
portraits of an American nobody since Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.
There are people who can't be stuffed into categories, or filed into
known types. Even Sy isnšt what we expect him to be.
The
film succeeds so beautifully, as did Taxi Driver, because its
lead is smart enough to know that the way to play this person isn't
to mock him but to understand him. Robin Williams gives us a Sy we can
fear but we can't hate. Like Robert De Niro, Williams uses those parts
of himself that drove him toward fame in the first place: that desperate
need to be liked, and to belong. In both Sy and Travis, we viewers know
that just a touch of real kindness, and these men wouldn't go to such
extremes. They are great pretenders and we never see them coming.
Romanek's
thoughtful camera reveals this new world order of the SavMart: generic
food boxes on shelves, generic and disposable toys, cameras, employees.
Sy's is a colorless world. The Yorkins are always emblazoned in a colorful
array. They are not "suburbia," but rather upper middle class America
more Pottery Barn than Target. The film tells us that money can buy
an appearance, but it can't make people happy.
A
picture, a snapshot tells us that we were happy then, we looked good.
Sometimes it's too easy to forget that a whole life surrounded the photo.
And, as Sy tells us, we don't take pictures of things we want to forget.
Sy, a blank slate covering the desperation, sees only things we want
to remember. He sees only smiles and good times. He doesn't get the
whole picture. He doesn't get to see what happens when we put the camera
down.
©2002 Sasha Stone
CineScene
