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Movie Review: One Hour Photo

A note of advice: Buy a digital camera. i

by A. Rosenbloom | 2002.10.19

For a while, Mark Romanek was the Martin Scorsese of the music video world. His videos were flashy but not pretentious, and visually astounding without sacrificing emotion. The clips he directed for Madonna and (most notably) Nine Inch Nails placed the artists in settings that ranged from empty post-apocalyptic wastelands to claustrophobic funhouses of pain. Romanek had the uncanny ability to make the viewer uncomfortable and sympathetic for four entertaining minutes at a time. With One Hour Photo , his feature film debut as writer and director, Romanek is able to achieve the same tension and emotion in 98 minutes as he was in the short form.

At first, it seems like Romanek has purposefully given himself a small and simple story to work with. Sy Parrish (a deep and brilliantly creepy Robin Williams) is your friendly neighborhood photo developer. He works at the photo counter of SavMart, which is a disturbingly sterile knock off of Target or WalMart. Sy seems nice and cheerful, remembering the names and even the address of the Yorkin family; Nina, Will, and little Jake. We assume that Sy is as nice to everyone as he is to the Yorkins, but we soon realize that he has a certain obsessive attachment to them. To Sy, whose all white hospital-clean apartment is very similar to his all white hospital-clean SavMart office space, the Yorkins are the perfect family.

The Yorkin clan seems to be the family that Sy never had. He has fantasies about being "Uncle Sy" and wants badly to become a part of the family unit, which appears to be quite nuclear. Of course, because Sy's only personal contact with the Yorkins (and many other customers) is through immobile photographs, things are not exactly how he perceives them to be. We soon realize that the story which unfolds, as well as the character of Sy, are much more complex than we had imagined. In the end, the question is not whether or not Sy find the happiness he so desires, but how far he will go in his attempts to infiltrate the Yorkin family.

Romanek and Williams have drawn out Sy so perfectly that, despite his actions which many times strike so scary and real, we feel sorry for him. We understand his routine, and hope that he gets all of the love he desires in his life. Even when he imagines an invasion of the Yorkin house, we don't want him to get caught, rather we want him to be a part of the family. It is a good thing that Williams inhabits nearly every frame in the film because when he is working closely with the camera the scenes are as tense and uncomfortable as anything in recent cinema. Romanek has drawn such a strikingly genuine and frightening performance out of Williams that it is a true wonder why he has left Connie Nielsen and Michael Vartan (Nina and William, respectively) out in the cold. The dialogue between them sounds as if it was written and their interactions look staged.

It is, however, easy to forgive Romanek for the lack of focus on the Yorkins (and for one scene between the married couple which should have been left on the cutting room floor) because of his incredible precision with his production. The SavMart looks like a shopping center designed by the 2001 art department, and Sy and his obsession with giving "his customers" the highest quality fits right in. Romanek has also managed to create an atmosphere similar to his videos, but in the inverse universe. While his videos portray uninhabitable deserts and plains, the world in One Hour Photo is a suburban wasteland. It looks almost uninhabitable, but we all know someone who lives a similar environment.

When Sy is around, the only colors in the palette for Romanek and his superb cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth (Fight Club) have to work with are white and blue, seriously. The only color in Sy's life comes from the photos he sees or steals for a massive mural on his apartment wall. When he moves from the blinding white of SavMart to the Yorkin house, Cronenweth brings with him warm shades of brown and red to give the impression (fake or real) of a safe place to be.

Romanek has done what only one other director before him has done: move from the short to the long form and create, right out of the gates, a thoughtful film that challenges our lifestyles. He has a lot to say about the "American family" and how it is perceved by those unfortunate souls who is not fortunate enough to have one. True, One Hour Photo is not perfect. Romanek has not changed the face of a genre like Spike Jonze, but it's a safe bet that we will see great things in the future from him. That is, of course, unless Trent Reznor comes calling.

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