11/12/2022 0 Comments One hour photo![]() The film centers around Si's growing fixation with this one family and his delusional belief that he too could somehow become an integral part of their family unit. And nobody is `grayer' than Si Parrish, an innocuous, socially undeveloped milquetoast who spends his days working as a photo developer in one of those sterile five-and-dime drug stores (just like the one in `The Good Girl') - and his nights sitting all alone in his drab apartment brooding over a massive family-photo shrine he has erected to the Yorkins, a seemingly happy family of three whose pictures Si has been developing, copying and obsessing over for more than seven years now. Romanek understands that the greatest threats to our safety and lives often come from the gray, nondescript people who surround us unnoticed, the `nobodies' whose benign faces and vacuous smiles reveal no trace of the insanity, evil and potential for doing us harm that may be lurking right there under the surface. Instead, Romanek has chosen to take a more subtle approach, fashioning a film that downplays the potential violence of its material while, at the same time, recognizing the humanity of its central figure. Given its premise, the film could easily have degenerated into a sordid, exploitative tale of obsession and madness. He believes so much in his philosophy of photography that he stalks with humanity.Robin Williams gives what may well be the performance of his career in `One Hour Photo,' a creepy psychological thriller written and directed with cool precision by Mark Romanek. And while the film’s stalker subplot is rote, Parrish nonetheless makes for a fascinating, albeit second-rate sex-pervert. Even the smaller details speak for themselves: an error on Nina’s print form foreshadows Parrish’s photo-mosaic a copy of Deepak Chopra’s Path to Love suggests something may be missing from Nina’s life and an episode of The Simpsons holds a tongue-in-cheek mirror up to the Yorkin family breakdown. Romanek’s frame-within-a-frame compositions seemingly engage Rear Window when Parrish scoffs at the Yorkin family’s put-on happy domesticity. When Will strays from the herd, he’s incriminated via a roll of film his mistress brings to the local SavMart. The lonely Parrish becomes obsessed with the seemingly perfect Yorkin family: father Will (Michael Vartan) brings home the bacon little Jake (Dylan Smith) plays soccer and mother Nina (Connie Nielsen) smothers everyone with not-everyone-is-lucky-like-we-are care. Not unlike the pictures Seymour develops for his customers, Romanek’s arresting images-as-snapshots speak for themselves, evoking the false reality of the film’s picket-fence suburbia. Despite a perceptive observation or two (“I cared enough in this world for someone to take my picture” and “No one takes a photograph of something they want to forget”), Seymour’s metaphysical commentary track is a shameless declaration of the film’s subtext. Robin Williams as a disgruntled-photo-lab-employee-cum-creep-with-a-heart-of-gold? If One Hour Photo’s well-duh casting coup is more or less a non-issue (as Seymour Parrish, Williams typically calls attention to himself), there’s still the matter of music-video maker Mark Romanek’s gratuitous use of voiceover. ![]()
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