The Clerk as Creep

A horror story about a soft-spoken psychotic looking for love in all the wrong places, Robin Williams’ new film, “One Hour Photo,” is certainly more downbeat than many of the actor’s earlier works, even if it’s nowhere as dark (or as scary) as the terrifying “Mrs. Doubtfire” or the genuinely fear-inspiring troika of “Patch Adams,” “Jakob the Liar” and “Bicentennial Man.”

The unfortunate truth is that, however talented, Williams has been giving many of us the creeps for years, long before he started hitting his stride by playing affable killers in films such as “Insomnia.” This hasn’t always been his fault: He’s worked with some rotten directors, most of whom have seemed intent on suppressing Williams’ intelligence as a performer and a thinker (much in evidence in his recent HBO concert special), leaving him to wallow in abject sentimentalism.

Films such as “Bicentennial Man” showed him at his bathetic worst but suggested that after a series of high and low comedies the actor was seeking to widen his emotional register. The problem with professional jokers, though, is that they can’t go for long without the audience’s love. So while one part of Williams was trying to do the serious acting thing, the other part relentlessly, often exhaustively rallied for our devotion with fidgety bits of business and ingratiating smiles that bordered on the desperate, anxious reminders of the clown beneath the tears.

In “One Hour Photo,” Williams barely sheds a tear as Sy, a photo-machine technician in a suburban store called SavMart, where he wields an eager-to-please mien that’s as lethal as a knife. One of those one-stop emporiums in which neither the lights nor the smiles are ever turned off, SavMart is Sy’s home away from home, namely because it’s where he’s the happiest. Under the store’s fluorescent glare, he tenderly processes his customers’ photographs, and daydreams about their lives, taking in their vacations and anniversaries, joys and embar-rassments with the hunger of a man starved for a human connection that doesn’t involve the words “Thank you, please come again.” Mostly, though, Sy loses himself in the Yorkins, an upscale young family of three with an apparently unlimited appetite for self-documentation.

As it happens, Nina and Will (Connie Nielsen and Michael Vartan) are so busy maintaining their designer lifestyle that they don’t give much thought to the weirdly insinuating clerk. Neither do they find it troubling that he seems overly familiar with the intimate details of their lives, including the date of son Jake’s ninth birthday, that he always orders one more set of photos than Nina asks for, and, perhaps as disturbing, dresses exclusively in shades of putty. Which is why it takes the Yorkins awhile to realize that Sy the friendly photo guy isn’t just an average monochromatic creep, he’s their very own personal stalker.

It sounds like another clever if pointless excursion into the abyss, and that’s more or less how it plays out. Yet, as written and directed by Mark Romanek, a music video director here making his second feature, “One Hour Photo” initially comes across as having more ambitions than the usual “Psycho” retread.

By zeroing in on a service industry worker and juxtaposing Sy’s reality with that of some of his picture-perfect customers, Romanek offers up a few ideas about how we live and work, and he does so, for the most part, without condescending to his characters. In vivid contrast to the Yorkins, Sy spends his free time in a grim cell of an apartment in which the only color is supplied by his stash of purloined photos. But if the technician doesn’t have enough, his idealized family seems to have too much for its own good. In one of the script’s sharpest exchanges, Will berates Nina for her profligate ways, fuming that if she wants to live in a house that looks like a magazine layout, she needs to understand his long work hours. She, in turn, accuses him of emotional negligence, an accusation that has the sting of the modern age but which Romanek fails to amplify in any meaningful manner.

“Some people think this is a job for a clerk,” Sy says of his job, but “there’s more to it.” The pathos of his self-deception (there isn’t more to it) imbues “One Hour Photo” with a sense of pained humanity you don’t often find in even more ambitious art-house thrillers. It doesn’t last long.

All too predictably, as if obeying some rule of genre, the director trades in his more involved ideas about alienation and voyeurism for an eruption of violence, then tags on some nonsense about marital fidelity that indicates that while his influences include Stanley Kubrick and Michael Powell, he’s also taking notes from Adrian Lyne.

If only Romanek was as committed to his characters, to getting at their fears and desires, as he is to lighting a scene and tending to the impeccable production design. The director elicits fine performances from his cast, but more impressive still is the geometric precision with which items are lined up on the shelves when Sy fantasizes that he’s alone in the SavMart. By then, Sy is a goner, although Williams keeps us tethered to the character longer than we might expect.

Doing his best to smother his inner Mork, the actor flattens his features into a mask, taming their wild animation. It’s a relief and it’s also smart, because by quieting his face and relieving us of its distractions, the actor gives us the space to figure out Sy for ourselves, to discover if he’s a genuine bad guy or simply another stray. Achingly lonely and deeply strange (those Velcro-secured sneakers set off screeching alarms), Sy is one of those people you don’t always see when you collect your change and drive through the tollgate. Although he loses sight of him eventually, Romanek invites us to see this invisible man and consider the costs of a world in which video monitors track our every move and signs exhort workers to “Check Your Smile.” Sy is watching the Yorkins, but he’s being watched too, smiling his way into oblivion.

MPAA rating: R, for sexual content and language. Times guidelines: One scene contains nudity and the suggestion of intense violence.

“One Hour Photo”

Robin Williams...Seymour Parrish

Connie Nielsen...Nina Yorkin

Michael Vartan...Will Yorkin

Dylan Smith...Jakob Yorkin

Erin Daniels...Maya Burson

A Catch 23 Entertainment/A Killer Films/Laughlin Park Pictures production, released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Screenwriter and director Mark Romanek. Producers Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler and Stan Wlodkowski. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth. Editor Jeffrey Ford. Costumes Arianne Phillips. Music Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek. Production designer Tom Foden. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.

Exclusively at Pacific’s the Grove, 189 the Grove Drive, L.A., (323) 692-0829, and Landmark’s Regent, 1045 Broxton Ave., Westwood, (310) 208-3259.