Pros: Good acting (great in Robin Williams's case), expressionist lighting, passionately empathetic script.
Cons: It's a couple of sentences too long.
The Bottom Line: I know and like many people (me included) who could have been Sy Parrish, given substantially worse luck. Even though this movie is creepy, it's for them, with love.
Given the poor critical reception One Hour Photo faced, I've been pleased and surprised to glance lightly over existing Epinions reviews of it and see lots of favorable feedback. My review should give the details of fewer plot events than the other ones claim to, which I hope helps. But I wish to start by focusing on the movie's framing device, which includes -- as a public service -- warning you of part of the ending. This is, as I'll explain, an anti-spoiler.
We begin One Hour Photo with Robin Williams's nebbishy, balding, ugly-glasses-wearing Sy Parrish being photographed in a stark room by the police. Parrish is asked why he did what he did. He looks upward and inward trying to formulate an answer; the actual 85 or so minutes of movie tell the story, including what exactly the police picked him up for; then we return to the interrogation room. He starts to give a well-acted non-explanation that, as delivered, tells the sympathetic policeman what he wants to know. And then...
And then, in 20 or 30 run-on words, Parrish reveals that his entire behavior -- probably his entire existence as Sy the Photo-Shop Guy, let alone his offense -- is because his father made him do awful things as a kid, and photographed those things. I tell you this because this is amazingly stupid. I tell you this because the entire rest of the movie has been about all the perfectly real, daily, present-day reasons why Sy is who he is; and indeed why his behavior is (well, not _is_, but should be) more sympathetic than creepy. I haven't seen such a smart movie show such complete last-scene incomprehension of its own purpose since the Breakfast Club ended with Ally Sheedy's character getting a makeover and dating the jock, while quiet nerdy writer Brian, transformed by the day of revelations, demonstrates everyone's transformation by sitting quietly and writing a letter.
But the Breakfast Club was more problematic, because as awful as the last scene was -- especially since it was being presented as a happy ending -- it was also, actually, sorta plausible. That is, the ending cast doubt on everything the movie seemed to teach. Whereas One Hour Photo's revelation is just wrong, and now you know this, and you can reject it. One Hour Photo is about child abuse the way American Pie is about the World War II firebombing of Dresden, the way Armageddon is about how to identify non-poisonous plants in the wild, the way Saving Private Ryan is about the day-to-day organization of the Detroit Tigers' scouting staff. It happens to be 20 or 30 words too long; fine. We can forget this, and focus on what the movie _is_.
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Sy Parrish works at the One Hour Photo booth at SavMart, a big, mythically empty department store with the charm and personal touch of an airbrushed Staples the size of Home Depot. He's worked there for 20 years, training all the new workers in the importance of getting everything exactly right. He's angry that most photo joints think prints can be done well by any random schmuck with a 2-day training course, and he's serious about the importance of true quality photographs. At one point we see him blamed for starting a ruckus because he's called a repair person to fix a machine that's going "+3 on the cyan count" and the repairmen rudely refuses to work. "Nobody even notices til the error's in double digits... the next time you call me, the machine better be in flames", yells the repairman; it's obvious, alas, that Sy's boss agrees.
"Most people never even think about it, but photographs are the way we fight against time", Sy states in one of his (very occasional) narrations. He is well-aware that photographs leave a false documentary trail, that they are full only of smiley moments and fond people: "Hardly anyone bothers to photograph the gas-station attendant, the fly landing on a piece of toast" (as always I paraphrase from memory). Yet, "If pictures have anything to say, it is this: I was here, I existed. I was young, and I was happy, and someone cared enough about me to take my picture".
No one takes Sy's picture. Well, except Sy: our first glimpse of him in public is when he takes over from trainee Yoshii to help Nina Yorkin, a regular SavMart One Hour Photo customer for maybe seven years. She has a final shot free in the roll of film she's bringing in; "shame to let it go to waste", Sy says with an imploring grin, and he takes a quick but expertly centered shot of himself. Told the shots are of her son Jakob's birthday party ("he's what, 9 now?", Sy correctly guesses), Sy also gives Jakob a free disposable camera -- as a promotion, of course. There's a friendly vibe going here, in a clerk-to-customer way; when Nina's husband Will sees the extra picture and asks "Who the hell is this guy?", Jakob explains "Sy! The Photo-shop guy", obviously considering this a sensible answer. Will grunts and tosses the photo onto an ashtray.
Dylan Smith, playing Jakob, is just grounded enough to convincingly pull off Jakob's sweetness: "When someone seems sad and don’t have any friends, it makes me feel bad for them”, he later tells Nina, explaining that it's Sy he's talking about. "How do you know he doesn't have any friends? Maybe he has lots of friends; maybe he has a girlfriend". But even she doesn't believe it; Robin Williams, comedian, looks here as if he's never risked forming a smile line in his life, and walks with the permanent stoop of the defeated. He feeds his hamster, and he watches TV, and he cares about photographs of people who are not him.
The plot from there, in broad outline, is this. Sy has spent seven years looking at happy photographs of Nina and Will and Jakob and their dog. Sy has become a little obsessed -- sure, he _knows_ what a biased record photographs give, but what he _sees_ is all this happy data, again and again, regular visit after regular visit. Sy starts to make efforts to accidentally run into Nina and Jakob, to talk to Will, to buy Jakob a present (he also takes lesser interest in other regular customers). Sy learns, through an unlikely-but-not-ridiculous coincidence, that the Yorkin household is less perfect than it seems. Sy can't tolerate this, and needs someone to blame. Sy does his best to give that blame, and enforce it. He is trying to protect the people he loves: to protect them from the gaping maw between their life and the one he's envisioned for them.
************
"I wasn't very good at sports when I was a kid", Sy tells Jakob as they walk after Jakob's soccer practice, which Sy just-happened to drive by on his way home from work. "I was kind of a pudgy kid, kind of... oh well, I was fat. I wasn't very popular, I guess". I'm wrong, in a way, to say that One Hour Photo has nothing to do with child abuse: it almost certainly has to do with the abuse other children heaped on Sy for being the kind of kid it's easy to heap abuse on. Many abused-by-peers kids develop the smarts, or the sense of humor, or the bravado, or the late-arriving good looks, or the charm, or the good luck needed to meld their way into a role. But no one's likely to _help_ them find their way, so some of them don't.
Does it seem harsh to say no-one will help? Maybe. From my own experience -- which had many Sy parallels through my early 20's -- I can wager a few things. I can say that no girl, even if she thinks you're smart and funny, is ever likely to say yes if, when you ask her on a date, you sound terrified. I can say that no girl, even if she thinks you're smart and funny _and_ you've learned to pretend you're not terrified, is ever likely to say yes if she thinks her date with you will be first time in weeks that anyone has hung out with you for fun.
I can say that the first good friends of either sex that I made outside of high school -- years after H.S. graduation -- were made because I learned to tell them nifty stories about the things I was doing, and they found the stories charming. They didn't know I'd made the stories up. They didn't find out, either. Once I had friends attracted to the neat stuff I did, I could _do_ neat stuff with them, and then use the real neat stuff as fodder for my next stories (although I've lost track of those first-wave friends, partly from embarrassment and because I lost the energy to maintain old plotlines). Sy Parrish though, like so many fellow losers, has never had the chutzpah to lie like that in the first place. He makes up his life quietly, for himself, daydreaming about being Uncle Sy for the Yorkins.
He should be admired, I think, for trying to befriend his customers. It is, nonetheless, a little creepy -- a subliminal sort of creepy, acknowledged by no party but perceived from the start by all (except young Jakob). Sy can't possibly just tell Nina that "hi, i'm sitting down next to you because i've come to really like you and i searched you out. Let's chat". That's not what store clerks do; store clerks are just, you know, store clerks. They take your money and give you products, and it's a little uncomfy for Nina even to accept free 5x7 upgrades of pictures she'd requested as 4x6. Once, before there was money, "reciprocity" was an abstract concept: your fellow tribesman gave you something (food, a tool, a backrub) because he could, and you'd do something for him later on whenever you could. This is probably where the feelings known as "friendship" come from, in fact, and friends still behave that way. But we don't need friends to get things; we need store clerks. We make the trade even-steven while it occurs, so no obligation is entailed, and no friendship is appropriate.
The film's awkwardest, truest tensions come whenever Sy's desire to break this barrier becomes -- at once -- too obvious to be comfortable, and not obvious enough to be satisfying. That he's a man adds to the tension, because we have endless myths, night after night, to remind us that men are threatening: that they only want one thing, that they'll commit harm to take it, that even a gift to a child could be pedophilia. I don't think Nina or Will or any other customer suspects this in a literal way, but Sy is a large man, capable of delivering hurt, and who really knows what anyone thinks? Probably the scariest scenes, for me, were Sy's one-on-ones with Jakob: not because Sy even possibly means Jakob any harm, but because of the likelihood that Jakob will figure out -- this scene? next scene? -- that he is supposed to reject Sy's love, that rejecting it is the thing he is required to do.
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This, perhaps, is why One Hour Photo has been criticized for trying to take on the role of a thriller. I'm not convinced it does any such thing. It provokes a plot point, sure, and probably it's just because there's no market for sitting around watching character stew over desires and fears that lead nowhere. But heck, Todd Haynes's Safe was a little slow and understated for _my_ tastes, let alone the Alien 4 crowd.
As a thriller goes, I'll simply that say that of course Sy is gonna know, from TV, the kinds of lines you say when you're the one with the big scary knife in your hands. There are strong enough reasons, in the plot and in his life, for him to become big knife guy.
And yet, in some sense he's arrested for taking photographs. In some sense he's arrested because he himself knows the power of a weird male misplaced clerk with a camera. Cameras stop time, and cameras block out large amounts of reality. Cameras say that you care. Care can be terrifying.
My friend Erin once was living with (and engaged to) a guy named Erik who asked her out four or five times before she said yes. Erik was showing the good traits of persistence and devotion: because she eventually said yes, that is. Being a stalker is a matter of bad timing. If Jodie Foster had told John Hinckley Jr. that his love for her pictures was a fine reason for him to come hang out sometime, Hinckley wouldn't have had to try and shoot a president for her.
Sy Parrish is a lot less unhinged than John Hinckley, Jr. Maybe you don't want that same endorsement on _your_ resume, but it's on his. In this case, it's a fine reason to spend 90 minutes with him.
Robin Williams delivers his finest hour (USA Today)in one of the eeriest, most absorbing, effective thrillers in years (NBC-TV). Sy the photo guy Parr...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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