Flak Magazine: Review of One Hour Photo, 9-23-02

The four fantasy sequences — a dream, two daydreams and a final shot that has no real narrative rationale — in Mark Romanek's thriller One Hour Photo show, to those still behind the times, is why we should have long ago retired "music video director" as a derogatory term. Like other third-wave video-cum-film directors such as Spike Jonze, Jonathan Glazer and Roman Coppola, Romanek brings a whip-smart grasp of visual metaphor to the big screen, and while this acumen is apparent throughout One Hour Photo, it's in these relatively brief fantasy sequences (only the second daydream lasts more than a minute) that his ability to pack simple images with meaning and emotion really comes through. It's the kind of visual thinking that you would think would be a prerequisite for film directing, but you don't have to see very many movies at all to learn this isn't the case.

This interest in the concentrated expressiveness of images drives One Hour Photo — not only behind the camera, but on the page (Romanek also wrote it). The movie follows instamat developer Sy (Robin Williams), who has worked at the local SavMart for as long as Nina Yorkin (Connie Nielsen) has been bringing her family's film there — which has been years, at least as long as she and husband Will (Michael Vartan) have been a family. As the developer of choice — or, really, convenience — Sy has seen everything in the Yorkins' lives, from post-honeymoon bliss to the birth and adolescence of their son Jakob (Dylan Smith) … and not only has he seen it, he's made himself a print of it. Though we never learn just why Sy has latched onto the Yorkins — sexual ardor for Nina isn't it — he has latched on hard; he sees himself as Uncle Sy, a non-participating member of your average happy family. When that happiness starts to waver, however, so does Sy's non-participatory status.

One Hour Photo has gotten a lot of credit for its depiction of big-box anomie — the spiritual netherworld of chain stores and their denizens. But speculation that Sy was made in Sam Walton's America misses the point — for one thing, Sy's workplace misfortunes are self-inflicted, not acts of corporate indifference to people's well-being; for another, Sy is gregarious with his customers and perfectionist in his work, which inverts the standard chain-store bugaboos. Certainly, Romanek's SavMart is perfectly realized — production-designed to within an inch of its life, though I don't mind the overachievement — and having Sy's boss be portrayed by Office Space yeeeaher Gary Cole certainly adds to the milieu, but: It's just the milieu. The soul of the film is elsewhere.

What's really on Romanek's mind are the ways in which we mediate our reality. And if that sounds like a horn-rimmed, film-school reading of the film, it's because the film is a horn-rimmed, film-school essay dressed up as a thriller. That's not meant as a turn-off, but there's no question that One Hour Photo is in a separate class from Fatal Attraction, Cape Fear, The Stepfather, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Breakdown, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and other familia interruptus thrillers. One Hour Photo is less lurid than those movies, less shrill. In those movies, such qualities are a virtue in much the same way that their absence is in One Hour Photo, but an audience anxious for high notes might be less sensitive to the movie's thoughtful, minor-key creepiness.

What's that tune? The movie announces it from the first scene, where the camera pans from the image of Sy on a closed-circuit monitor to Sy himself through a one-way mirror. The whole movie is about what we see through, the ways in which we package reality, all the things that stand between us and authentic experience. A lot of the way Romanek clues us to this idea are pretty on-the-nose — Sy's windshield is cracked; Sy looks at himself in a "check your smile" mirror; Sy appears in chem-lab regalia on the SavMart surveillance cameras; Sy spies on people through his camera's zooming viewfinder. We see more subtle moments as well: a disparaging comment from Will to Nina that their home is patterned after design-magazine photo spreads; Will's manipulation of virtual home accouterments for his design job; the theme of the picture-perfect family.

The centerpiece, however, is the pictures themselves. The most awesome moment is Sy's wall-covering display of what may well be all the photos the Yorkins have taken since their marriage — collage would be the term if only they weren't mechanically arranged, edge-to-edge. But Romanek also gets a lot of mileage out of other effects: an eerie flipbook, a series of semi-abstract shots taken by Jakob, a "secret" set of exposures. Like everything else in the film, these have been art-directed to the nth, but the effect is glorious. And although you get caught up in Sy's obsessions, Romanek is just as bad; it's hard to tell if the proper comparison for his mania is to Stanley Kubrick or Jack Torrance. (In fact, the blurring between these directors and their characters is, in both instances, telling — could Sy possibly be so obsessed with lower-quality snapshots, or is his dementia in proportion to the carrots Romanek's dangling?) The photographs are everything that long stretches of the movie are not: vivid, glamorous, warm. But what does it mean that the photos — intentional acts of moment-capturing — are totally dissimilar from their basically miserable subjects (whose basic misery is being intentionally captured by Romanek)?

These are the kind of reflective spirals that One Hour Photo pushes viewers toward. In large part, these observations are no great shakes, but the movie shows that the thoughtful posing of an easy question can be as valuable as a more challenging quandary — One Hour Photo gets under your skin, and gets you thinking in a non-trivial way about your life in pictures. Certainly these issues are more rewarding than the small, tidy boxes into which Romanek puts his story in its penultimate scene, which are adequate, but ultimately reductive. (Could it be that Sy was traumatized by a camera as a child? Yes, indeed!)

In similar movies, the stalker/killer is fundamentally interested in disrupting the happy family. Like The Stepfather, however, One Hour Photo's antagonist is fanatical about preserving the status quo. But where The Stepfather de-romanticized the idea of the nuclear family, Romanek is practically maudlin about it — again, just like Sy — and while Sy's outré behavior does a lot to combat your sympathy for him, your feelings for the Yorkins (at least as the proto-family — "your kin") puts you on his side when he acts out against those things that might derail them — even when, notably, members of the Yorkins would rather go along to get along than get confrontational.

Williams turns on the anti-charm as Sy (for the second bad pun of the film, his full name is Seymour Parrish — "see more; perish") in a measured, nervous performance to rival his buttoned-down turn in Insomnia. Even at a low wattage, though, Williams commands the frame to a degree that puts his co-stars through their paces. While they keep up, it would have been nice to see Williams clashing with more established stars, particularly because the climax trades on the audience's feelings toward Will, an effect which could have been cannily fortified by star quality. This is not to say that Vartan doesn't handle the role well, but in a movie concerned with all the things that complicate seeing clearly, that star persona would have been a worthy extra layer. Still, One Hour Photo has layers enough to distinguish it from the boiling-rabbit crowd, striking a fine balance between under- and overthought that makes it a particularly satisfying chiller.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)