Spoilers follow.
The first half hour is the weakest. It seems to consist of little more than forced, awkward little conversations and encounters between Sy and members of the family he obsesses about, in which Sy is too familiar, too friendly, too knowing, and the family members don't quite pick up on this - although there's always the chance that Sy will go just a hair's breadth further, and they will. This is just painful to watch. Mark Romanek doesn't yet have the skill as a director to make any of his early scenes come to life, and apart from establishing the fact that Sy is not entirely right in the head, and doing so too obviously, he doesn't seem to know where he's going. (It must also be said that even throughout the excellent final hour Romanek's competent but sometimes ill-judged direction is the biggest enemy of Romanek's fist-rate script: I wish he had used music, if at all, as music, not as a cheap horror movie sound effect; that he'd kept the camera still while showing us Sy's collection of photos of the Yorkins, rather than zooming in on them; that he hadn't included a brief dream sequence straight out of "Hellraiser".) At the start of the film it's hard not to be disappointed. "One Hour Photo" has an inspired premise; it deserves inspired story-telling.
Which it ends up getting. Romanek creates something far more interesting and affecting out of his premise than I'd dared hope. The moment that jolts the film from mediocrity to brilliance is the scene in which Bill, the Sav-Mart manager, calls Sy up to his office to fire him. We keenly feel what a terrible thing this must be for Sy. We'd already known that Bill was a prick. When there was an altercation between Sy and the machine repair guy Bill had coldly reprimanded Sy about starting fights in the store, without bothering to find out who started bellowing first (it was in fact the repair guy, not Sy), or what the dispute was about (it was about something important, and Sy was completely in the right). Bill attacks Sy and undermines what little power he has in the cruellest way he can. And the manner in which Sy gets fired is likewise cruel. A decent human being - and one doesn't get to be manager of a shopping complex by being a decent human being - would have at least given Sy a choice about whether to continue working for the rest of the week, or not (without, of course, making Sy's severance salary or back holiday pay dependent on how he chose). The conditions under which Sy is expected to come to work for the rest of the week are intolerable. Not that his work conditions had been tolerable beforehand: he'd been forced to wear humiliating clothes, all but coerced into providing a poor service (we admire him for resisting), not once been TREATED like a human being, and made to set up shop inside a shopping mall more hideous and dystopian than any I've seen in Australia - I suspect more hideous and dystopian than any existing in the USA, either, although in either case it's only a slight exaggeration of reality, and in years to come it may not be an exaggeration at all.
From here on the film doesn't set a foot wrong - until, perhaps, the final moment. I think it was a mistake to have Sy tell the police (but mainly the audience) about his childhood, "explaining" his subsequent behaviour by letting us know he was abused as a child, all too neatly adding (one can imagine Sigmund Freud ticking off the one remaining item on his checklist) that his father used to take photos of him doing degrading things. I'm not saying the scene doesn't work. Robin Williams didn't need to deliver this speech at all, since already in this film he'd gained our sympathy far more than he ever had in the past - but it must be said he delivers his lines movingly. And it's good that the policeman questioning Sy was given the chance to behave in a civilised manner, and nice for a change, in an American film, to see such civilised behaviour, rather than the usual fascist brutality, held up as an ideal. But we already knew that SOMETHING about the first part of Sy's life had been unhappy. Best to leave it at that. We can speculate if we want to. Besides, Sy's unhappy early life, whatever form it may happen to take, is only part of the story. Just as important, if not more so, in understanding why he went over the edge are the years of slavery he spent at Sav-Mart.
The first half hour is the weakest. It seems to consist of little more than forced, awkward little conversations and encounters between Sy and members of the family he obsesses about, in which Sy is too familiar, too friendly, too knowing, and the family members don't quite pick up on this - although there's always the chance that Sy will go just a hair's breadth further, and they will. This is just painful to watch. Mark Romanek doesn't yet have the skill as a director to make any of his early scenes come to life, and apart from establishing the fact that Sy is not entirely right in the head, and doing so too obviously, he doesn't seem to know where he's going. (It must also be said that even throughout the excellent final hour Romanek's competent but sometimes ill-judged direction is the biggest enemy of Romanek's fist-rate script: I wish he had used music, if at all, as music, not as a cheap horror movie sound effect; that he'd kept the camera still while showing us Sy's collection of photos of the Yorkins, rather than zooming in on them; that he hadn't included a brief dream sequence straight out of "Hellraiser".) At the start of the film it's hard not to be disappointed. "One Hour Photo" has an inspired premise; it deserves inspired story-telling.
Which it ends up getting. Romanek creates something far more interesting and affecting out of his premise than I'd dared hope. The moment that jolts the film from mediocrity to brilliance is the scene in which Bill, the Sav-Mart manager, calls Sy up to his office to fire him. We keenly feel what a terrible thing this must be for Sy. We'd already known that Bill was a prick. When there was an altercation between Sy and the machine repair guy Bill had coldly reprimanded Sy about starting fights in the store, without bothering to find out who started bellowing first (it was in fact the repair guy, not Sy), or what the dispute was about (it was about something important, and Sy was completely in the right). Bill attacks Sy and undermines what little power he has in the cruellest way he can. And the manner in which Sy gets fired is likewise cruel. A decent human being - and one doesn't get to be manager of a shopping complex by being a decent human being - would have at least given Sy a choice about whether to continue working for the rest of the week, or not (without, of course, making Sy's severance salary or back holiday pay dependent on how he chose). The conditions under which Sy is expected to come to work for the rest of the week are intolerable. Not that his work conditions had been tolerable beforehand: he'd been forced to wear humiliating clothes, all but coerced into providing a poor service (we admire him for resisting), not once been TREATED like a human being, and made to set up shop inside a shopping mall more hideous and dystopian than any I've seen in Australia - I suspect more hideous and dystopian than any existing in the USA, either, although in either case it's only a slight exaggeration of reality, and in years to come it may not be an exaggeration at all.
From here on the film doesn't set a foot wrong - until, perhaps, the final moment. I think it was a mistake to have Sy tell the police (but mainly the audience) about his childhood, "explaining" his subsequent behaviour by letting us know he was abused as a child, all too neatly adding (one can imagine Sigmund Freud ticking off the one remaining item on his checklist) that his father used to take photos of him doing degrading things. I'm not saying the scene doesn't work. Robin Williams didn't need to deliver this speech at all, since already in this film he'd gained our sympathy far more than he ever had in the past - but it must be said he delivers his lines movingly. And it's good that the policeman questioning Sy was given the chance to behave in a civilised manner, and nice for a change, in an American film, to see such civilised behaviour, rather than the usual fascist brutality, held up as an ideal. But we already knew that SOMETHING about the first part of Sy's life had been unhappy. Best to leave it at that. We can speculate if we want to. Besides, Sy's unhappy early life, whatever form it may happen to take, is only part of the story. Just as important, if not more so, in understanding why he went over the edge are the years of slavery he spent at Sav-Mart.