A +3 Shift in Reality
One Hour Photo. Dir. Mark Romanek. 2002.
Ever since The Silence of the Lambs won the Oscar in 1991 (and
one one year later Cronos was named a Cannes Film Festival
winner), directors have discovered that horror movies can include a small--make
that miniscule--body count, and still be effective. Alejandro Amenabar,
with The Others , taught filmgoers that no body count is even necessary
to produce an eerie piece, as long as the film is littered with fog, dark
corridors, creepy old houses, and a few ghosts, even of the non threatening
variety. With One Hour Photo, director / writer Mark
Romanek produces an even more wondrous breed of horror--the ordinary world
slasher flick where no one is killed.
Romanek creates an effectively disturbing, dare I say eerie film,
with his story of Seymour Parrish, or Sy the Photo guy as he is affectionately
called throughout the movie. Sy, as his name implies, is a born loser,
one of those humans for whom life is a terrible journey of day-to-day loneliness.
In some of the movie's best scenes, we see Sy at home, taking the
only glass he seems to own out of the drain board, to get himself a glass
of water from the tap. From what we can tell, Sy owns one set of silverware
and one place setting, for he has no need of a second fork, knife, or plate.
Sy eats alone. Sy watches T.V. alone in a large living room
with only one chair. Sy sits alone wherever he goes.
If utter loneliness isn't horrific enough for most viewers, we soon
discover that Sy has an obsession with a local family for whom he has been
processing photos since the family's inception through marriage. The
Yorkins, Will, Nina, and their son Jakob, are the objects of Sy's obsession.
Sy has no intercourse with real people. Like chat room junkies
and online virtual meat market obsessives, Sy seeks a relationship without
having to interact physically. The reason he does so is made clear
at the film's end and is the raison d'etre of One Hour Photo, as
it is a film about the family unit and its role in producing functional
human beings who grow up to become normal people--people who don't stalk
families because they get lonely.
And that is the central issue of One Hour Photo, loneliness.
Sy creates an entire world in his head, beginning with his attending
the Yorkin's wedding, and even fantasizes about breaking into the Yorkin
home to see how each room, including the bathroom, is the picture perfect
replica of the images he has seen for almost a decade whenever he develops
the Yorkins' prints. In his fantasy, the family accepts him as Uncle
Sy, and enjoys his visits. The sad truth is that two of the family members,
Nina and young Jakob, intuit that Sy is sad and lonely, and actually attempt
normal interactions with him, to try to be his friends. Will, however,
thinks Sy is creepy and refuses to allow Jakob to even take a toy from
what amounts to a kind old man.
The true artistry of One Hour Photo is that Sy is just a kind
old man for three fourths of the film. Robin Williams is a shoe-in
Oscar nominee for his portrayal of Sy's slow-burn from being a well intentioned
bystander to becoming a blackmailer, and ultimately, would-be killer.
Sy's world, as screwed up as it is, is actually a comfortable one
for him, until the skewed lenses through which he views reality (and the
movie is rife with lenses: mirrors, eyeglasses, windows, camera lenses,
etc.) starts to show a few cracks. Sy's boss, Bill Owens, a small
time department store manager played wonderfully by the always creepy Gary
Cole (American Gothic is still in my opinion the best TV horror
series ever) has it in for Sy, and watches him like a hawk, catching him
at one juncture giving a cheap disposal camera away to the boy. Eventually,
Cole fires Sy in one of the most heartbreaking scenes I've ever seen on film.
Once he is deprived of his only sense of reality, Sy threatens to
become a maniacal spree killer. Not only is he out of work and bereft
of the only family he has ever known; he also discovers, through looking
at the prints that have been brought in for developing by a long-time customer
named Maya Burson, that Will Yorkin has been cheating on his wife. Sy
tries to right the wronged family unit by informing Nina Yorkin of her husband's
infidelity, but soon discovers that the perfect family isn't so perfect:
Nina has a lover as well, and for this reason takes no action against her
cheating husband.
At the end of his rope, Sy loses his fragile grip on reality and decides
that he is going to teach Will Yorkin a lesson about being "a good father."
He steals a butcher knife from the department store on his last day
of work, and traps Yorkin and Burson in their hotel room, while they are
enjoying a midday tryst. The remainder of the film is dedicated to
the police attempts to reach Sy before he can do anything (the police become
involved because Sy has his apprentice develop threatening
photographs to teach Owens that his family can be taken away as well ), and
it ends with the police interview which frames the movie, wherein we finally
learn the reasons for Sy's inability to live a normal life.
What makes One Hour Photo work is the subtlety with which Romanek
and Williams infuse the character of Sy Parrish. The two create a
man who is off-center enough so that his emotional deterioration is believable
(unlike Williams' portrayal of the accidental murderer in his last film,
Insomnia, which is completely unbelievable). Because Sy is
one of us gone a little astray, viewers don't se him as a monster, so much
as a victim of circumstances. This is important because despite his
flaws, Sy Parrish has always been and still is the victim of forces beyond
his control. Like his counterpart Francis Dolderhyde in Red Dragon
, he is himself a victim of past abuses. However, where Red Dragon
falls into the trap of becoming a mediocre Hollywood film that follows
the typical abused child turned serial killer pattern, One Hour Photo
challenges the viewer to find the bad guy.
Ultimately, it is not a film about a killer who must be stopped, nor
is it a treatise for the nuclear family and against child abuse. At
the end of the movie, no one is really saved. It seems the Yorkins'
marriage will be salvaged, but only out of desperation and due to the threat
of imminent death. It's as though Sy Parrish's butcher knife, although it
never touched human flesh, has sliced the cancer of infidelity from the
Yorkin marriage. Thus the ultimate irony of this slasher film without
a body count is that the "killer" actually rights the wrongs of the world
around him.
CAST:
Robin Williams .... Seymour Parrish
Connie Nielsen .... Nina Yorkin
Michael Vartan .... Will Yorkin
Dylan Smith .... Jakob Yorkin
Eriq La Salle .... Det. James Van Der Zee
Erin Daniels .... Maya Burson
Paul H. Kim .... Yoshi Araki
Gary Cole .... Bill Owens
