One Hour Photo. Directed and written by Mark Romanek. With Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen, Michael Vartan, Gary Cole, and Eriq La Salle. A Fox Searchlight Pictures release (95 minutes). At the Flagship, Opera House, Providence Place 16, and Showcase cinemas.

Many fears color One Hour Photo, music-video director Mark Romanek's slick stab at an arty, Hitchcockian thriller: loneliness, alienation, guilt over voyeurism. Robin Williams's narcissism overwhelms them all. He's playing bad guys these days -- Death to Smoochie, Insomnia -- but undercutting the menace is the recognition that all he really wants is a big hug. That need and a bad blond dye job add to the creepiness of Williams's anti-hero, Sy Parrish, in this film, but they also reduce its moral edge to wishy-washy bathos.

Wishy-washy dominates the color scheme and the decor, too, from Sy's buttery locks to his mouse-gray shoes to the sterile lines, artificial light, and monochrome tones of the CVS-like convenience store where he works as a photo-lab attendant. It looks like a place where Hannibal Lecter might be kept in isolation, and as such it mirrors the desolation of Sy's soul as he's bullied by bosses and dines alone in an empty restaurant.

He's a perfectionist at his job, however, and takes good care of favorite customers like Nina Yorkin (Connie Nielsen), who seems to be enjoying a model family life with a spunky, well-behaved 10-year-old boy, Jakob or "Jake" (Dylan Smith), and a successful entrepreneur husband, Will (Michael Vartan), who provides her with a Mercedes SUV and designer clothes but not much face time. Such darker moments, however, don't get recorded in the rolls of film Nina brings in for "Sy, the photo guy" to develop. As Sy notes in one of his philosophical voiceovers, "No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget."

These asides from Sy in fact provide the film with an element of genuine poignance, and Williams recites them with an ironic restraint that calls to mind one of his best performances, in the little-noted Seize the Day (1986). There he achieved the kind of Everyman pathos he has been so desperately unsuccessful at recapturing in the likes of Patch Adams and Bicentennial Man. Here his little odes to those who seek immortality, or at least existential credibility, by seizing the moment through snapshots ring true because the tragic ephemerality he describes is indeed common to all.

Although Sy shows wisdom in his general observations about human nature, he has a little trouble keeping reality and fantasy separate in his personal life -- yet this narrative unreliability proves to be more plot device than psychological insight. Sy's obsession with the Yorkins begins harmlessly -- the wall of his dismal apartment is layered with dupes of their bright, smiling photos, and his stalking of young Jake proves more avuncular than pedophilic. But it all deteriorates as he tries to get closer to them, breaking down the wall between observer and observed, and as what he discovers turns out to be less ideal than he dreamed.

As the dreams and the nightmares take over, so do the baser filmmaking instincts of Williams and Romanek. After its promising, even touching start, Photo develops into an ugly exercise in manipulation, and all the sympathy it had nurtured and the poetry it had aspired to turn to emotional, and literal, pornography. Not even an honest, low-key performance by Eriq La Salle as a police detective can alter the direction the film takes. Photo resorts in the end to that ultimate Hollywood ploy, sheer hypocrisy, Sy satisfying our need to see deviance punished even as he indulges our desire to enjoy it.

One of many films Photo borrows from is Michael Powell's notorious Peeping Tom (1960), a masterpiece that explores the voyeuristic and sado-masochistic elements at the heart of cinema with such unblinking honesty that it promptly ended the director's career. Romanek needn't worry about a similar fate -- he should flourish, having demonstrated in Photo enough stylistic verve, narrative intelligence, and cinema savvy to conceal his conventionality. And Williams, after a stretch of box-office and critical poison, should experience a Sy of relief. After verging on the creation of a truly disturbing and commercially problematic character, he backs off, leavening his Norman Bates with a little Boo Radley. He mugs us, then he hugs us, spoiling a picture that could have been hard to forget.

Issue Date: September 13 - 19, 2002