Review: One Hour Photo
Genre: Suspense/Thriller
MPAA rating: R (for sexual content and language)
Running time: 1:38
Release date: 2002
Cast: Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen, Michael Vartan, Dylan Smith, Andrew A. Rolfes
Directed by: Mark Romanek
Related article: Robin Williams is getting Oscar buzz for 'One Hour Photo'

His name is Sy, as in sigh.

In "One Hour Photo," he speaks in the voice of a man who has drained all the color from his own life to keep from drowning in it. He's literally washed out. Working behind the photo counter at a SavMart store, Sy Parrish dips his hands into stop bath as if it were amniotic fluid, listening carefully to what each family snapshot and amateur porn picture is saying to him: "I was here. I existed. Someone cared enough about me in this world to take my picture."

When someone finally takes Sy's picture in "One Hour Photo" — writer-director Mark Romanek's wonderful new creep-o-rama, starring Robin Williams — it may be the first proof of Sy's existence in this world. "Do you guys have your own lab, or do you send it out?" he asks the police detective (played by Eriq LaSalle of "ER" ) who has just ordered a set of mug shots. The rest of the film is a flashback explaining a set of photographs that Sy took — but we can't see — just before he was arrested.

"When we look through our photo albums, we're seeing a record of only the happy moments in our lives," Sy tells us, in a voice that has taken on the unmistakable hum of fluorescent lighting. "No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget."

The photographs Sy takes actually belong to other people. For years he has been developing — and stealing — extra sets of prints of the picture-perfect Yorkin family, whose snapshots look like they belong in a Lands' End catalog. Nina and Will Yorkin (played by Connie Nielsen and Michael Vartan) and their 9-year-old son Jake (Dylan Smith) exist in a state of glossy, 4-by-6 perfection on a wall in Sy's home.

When Nina and Jake drop off a roll at the SavMart, Sy reels off their address before she can say it, and he's so desperate to keep them at the counter a moment longer, he gives Jake a camera for free. Nina and Jake walk out of the store to their lives — their perfect lives — and climb in their enormous SUV for home, their perfect home. When Sy's work day is over, he trudges out to his economy car and finds his windshield cracked. At the diner where he eats alone, a waitress sees him looking at family pictures and assumes they are of his family. Sy lets her assume.

Williams has made a career of playing sad sacks like this, and you tend to watch him expecting Sy to turn into another one of his mawkish, self-pitying clowns. But Romanek plants his camera in front of the actor's face, and together he and Williams have created a remarkable portrait of cipher. Sy doesn't just live vicariously through the Yorkin family, he is living only when he's looking at them. Voyeurs bring their objects of desire into their own sweaty vortex of imagining, but Sy projects himself toward the pictures. He's a voyeur by proxy, sucking what life he can from the borderless efflorescence of the rainbow on his wall.

This is a dazzling feature debut for Romanek, who has been making music videos until now. He is obviously a fan of the late Stanley Kubrick, and a long tracking shot of Sy as he walks through the store's aisles seems to invoke the famous tracking shots in "The Shining." And when Romanek puts Sy in a dream shot dressed completely in white, standing next to empty white store shelves, under white fluorescent lights, Kubrick fans may be tempted to shout bloody redrum.

There are only a few small miscues. When Nina and Will start to quarrel, Sy seems to know it even before he has the photographic proof. And when he does know it, he seems to know more than he could just from looking at their pictures. Also, the store's manager (Gary Cole) knows about the free camera Sy gave to Jake — setting the movie's slightly wimpy climax in motion — but how does he know?

None of this really detracts from the icky pleasures of "One Hour Photo," which arrive in such abundance you may think you ordered a duplicate set.