Fourth in a series: Post-9/11 Blues, Internet-infected Brave
New World: A revisiting of 2001-10 pop
(and political) culture
Subsections below:
Appearances become deceiving about the main characters
A look at details shows the craftwork and influence
Sy is put into deviant action by a stain on the perfect image he has
beheld
A level of family integrity is a consolation, which Sy doesn’t have
What about Sy threatening his boss?
Sy is probably the saddest victim here
[Edit 8/21/14.]
I saw this film in the theater.
I thought it was bit slight and truncated when I saw it then; but in reviewing
it this past week—and I had considered doing it even before the death of Robin Williams—I am struck by a few things: it
is a subtle, intelligent horror film whose details count to a high degree; it
is a good example of Williams doing simple drama, and he turns out to be the
most sympathetic character here; and, especially in style, it is a surprisingly
derivative film, such as of such landmarks as Psycho (1960) and The Shining
(1980)—but is still interesting despite its lack of originality (on a technical
level).
Seymour (“Sy”) Parrish
(Williams) is a quiet, conscientious, slightly obsessive photo-development worker
in a drop-off facility in a large discount store, meant to echo Wal-Mart but
called SaveMart. He seems to dote on favorite customers, such as the Yorkin
family, whose young mother Nina (Connie Nielsen)
usually comes in, typically with her son Jake (Dylan Smith). We eventually find, about 18 minutes into the
film, that Sy is no ordinary photo-development worker: he has a huge trove of
copies of photos of his customers—actually, primarily of the Yorkin family—on
his living room wall in his anonymous, sparsely furnished apartment.
We thus have a story of a
stalker; but of what sort, we might be uncertain, which keeps us hooked into
the film with its well-handled suspense. I don’t want to give too much away,
because I think it’s worth seeing for those new to it—even if the technology
that is one of its subjects, the widespread consumer use and development of
film-type snapshots, has (amazingly, to me) become outmoded. But this story
could, today, be transmuted into something about Internet stalking, with maybe
someone collecting an electronic trove of hundreds of photos from someone
“dear’s” various online roosts (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
The film is very stylized, and
it seems well planned by its writer/director—Mark Romanek, who has had a career in music videos (the color
scheming, if nothing else, suggests this)—as a comment on materialistic,
depersonalizing society (especially in the SaveMart store), as well as a
comment on our society’s placing static image (and the associated
sexiness/cuteness) above the more ambiguous, interrelated, and dynamic aspects
of life. The craft with which this film is made helps make it worth seeing
twice (which I did this month, and with my original viewing in, it would seem, 2002,
that makes it three times, though I think that’s enough for me).
Appearances become deceiving about the main characters
And though Sy is presented, from
almost the first shot (and from his periodic, calm narration that shows him to
be something of a philosopher about his work), as a sort of amusement-stirring geek,
with Williams’ hair cut short, thinning on top, and colored a sort of weird
blond, Sy turns out to be—even while we wonder and worry what he will do under
scary pressure—the most sympathetic character. This is not only because the
worst violence he resorts to—which I think it OK to reveal—involves his
wielding a hunting knife, while not even drawing blood with it; it’s also
because the lonely, obsessive Sy—despite the well-tooled looks that people give
to or about him, well depicting the social signs of alienation of this
man—somehow earns our sympathy, and seems the most well-rounded person here
emotionally, while the “lovely” family he devotes such attention to ends up
seeming rather two-dimensional and less lovely than their photos might suggest —and
while his less-pleasant, hard-ass boss (Gary Cole)
seems pretty consistently the semi-stereotype he is.
In fact, what is funny—and is
especially striking with Mrs. Yorkin, who often looks to us like a model (with
weirdly “stylish” hair that looks it was lazily barretted up in the morning)—is
that the snapshots of the family make them seem so artificially attractive and
almost fake, that it would seem (from the director’s angle) that serenity is implied by their looking like
models. But we find—again, probably per the director’s calculated intent—that
they are rather emotionally shallow (except, in a sense, for the kid), and
there is, of course, also a “dark secret” buried in the family’s life—an
extramarital affair conducted by the slightly frumpy-looking husband.
A look at details shows the craftwork and influence
There are a number of Kubrickian touches in this film. The
tracking shots, perhaps with a person framed geometrically in a receding
hallway or the like, seem right out of The
Shining, along with zooming shots, and a general way of presenting Sy in
repose, like a nice/quiet version of Jack Torrance. What is more interesting
here is the way director Romanek fashions, here and there, a refined social-cue
way of setting off Sy, and showing where “normal” people stand regarding him
and otherwise (which isn’t entirely to their credit).
On a more appealing, visceral level, the way a child can
have an intuitive, trusting attitude more than “wised-up” adults is used with
young son Jake, notably early in the film, when he reveals plaintively to his
mother he’s sad for “someone” who doesn’t have any friends, etc., and his
mother elicits from him that that person is Sy. Later, with Jake well involved
with peers and coach on a sports field, and Sy more ominously seated (alone) in
bleachers like a casual, cheering fan who’s just happened to stop by, Jake
shows a more skepticism-tinged puzzlement at Sy.
(There is also a sort of Spielbergian touch, when the Yorkin
parents are fighting—over money—and we find a one-person shot of Jake
overhearing them, a little sadly.)
For a more adults-only measure of the subtle ways that “the
presence of an eccentric” are handled, notice how Sy, when he meets up with
Mrs. Yorkin at the mall food court, has a way of being aware of social
boundaries, moving charily/shyly with his food tray, yet still skirting the
social boundaries a bit by moving to be near her; and she is on the phone, and,
courteous to him, curtails the conversation (by the way, I think she says
something that reveals she might be suspicious of her husband having an affair,
which Sy doesn’t seem to hear). She makes peaceable conversation with Sy, and
they both acknowledge the coincidence of running into one another, even while
Sy is more aware there is less than real coincidence than it seems.
All this stuff sets up a sense in us of, “What is Sy
eventually going to do? Is he going to go postal?”
The film gives, overall, a rather shallow story, and to some
extent is more an exercise in technique than something freighted with great
social insights and themes. But, today, it does seem apropos, in terms of
average people’s paranoia—such as about mass-shooters—being more “of the time,”
which is an unfortunate development but still in need of ameliorating social
recognition.
What makes this film especially interesting is that, as it
turns out, Sy is less of a danger than the early building of suspense-via-character-actions
may suggest. And we can infer from things we can see, once we know the score
more, that part of the reason for Sy’s alienation, and the crises that erupt,
is his position in society—a more global Gestalt,
where how he is regarded, and accommodated (or not), helps create the problem
that he ends up presenting, in his desperation, in more sensational fashion. We
become less sympathetic to the Yorkins when we find that not only are they
cheerful but shallow upscale types, who (to Sy’s quirky disillusionment) can
have an extramarital affair like any other family, and their emotional life
only gets richer when they confront an emergency, rather than just enjoy the
“happy middle-class life” that is shown in their almost-too-idealized photos.
Sy is put into deviant action by a stain on the perfect image he has
beheld
As I just hinted, the
extramarital affair within the Yorkin family is such that it becomes an
“inevitable trigger”: Sy has been fired by his boss for a laundry list of
“infractions” that individually don’t seem like too big a deal (or, item by
item, are things that could be mitigated if the boss really wanted to keep Sy
on staff--except for, arguably, Sy's having made copies of a customer's photos for himself, which his boss doesn't fully know about). Then Sy is initially sent reeling into a bit of not-hard-to-understand
instability by his firing. But then he coolly investigates and discovers the
affair (partly by checking a photo on his living room wall), and then the
conclusive discovery has a sort of shattering effect on him. But it also places
him on track, with his steely self-control and canniness, to confront the ones
having the affair.
It’s almost as if for the
perfect family to be an apple of his eye with a bit of horrid rot inside it, he
must chastise (or purge) the rot in no uncertain terms, as a way of restoring
justice to the area of the world to which he’s become a loving witness.
One obvious irony, of course, is
that, for Sy, this family that seemed so perfect in photos is not always perfect
in action. But more notably and subtly, the adulterers (Mr. Yorkin and Maya
Burson [Erin Daniels]), once Sy has
“cornered” them, only really seem to have a rich emotional life when they
(especially the dynamo of a company-owning father) are faced—in a rather
helpless situation—with a stark threat of violence.
A level of family integrity is a consolation, which Sy doesn’t have
Another irony is that, as Sy
seems hard to understand, even though (before the threat of violence just
mentioned) Nina (Mrs.) Yorkin is tipped off about the adultery (by Sy), she still
maintains some family harmony at dinner, showing the way family connections can
provide a guideline, consolation, and bulwark against chaos even when there is
a “snake” of wrongdoing in its midst. This consolation/bulwark is something Sy,
sadly, doesn’t have in his life. Mrs. Yorkin even shows “how much she has in
her family” by claiming in emergency-charged tones on the phone, during a
moment of near-panic, that she knows her husband is screwing Maya Burson, but
the other person on the phone should just try to get him on the phone anyway.
So family connection trumps something ostensibly undermining it even there.
(Notice that this happens in a
family that, today more than 10 years ago, many would decry as—in their looks
and in their home—hopelessly shallow and as burnished and almost-unbelievable
as a glossy layout in an upscale lifestyle magazine. The father is able to
support what lifestyle they have from his owning, at a moderately young age,
his own business—where the woman with whom he has the affair also works.)
But there is something a little
fake about Nina Yorkin’s staunch tone here, as if it’s from a rather corny TV
action movie.
What about Sy threatening his boss?
It’s a vignette that maybe takes the portrait of Sy a little
darker than Romanek otherwise tends to provide overall, when—after having left
his job on its last day—Sy takes a series of photos of his boss’s daughter
(playing in her backyard), and like an early version of motion pictures—as the
boss finds himself—when you flip through the photos quickly from front to back,
you see an effect like someone is zooming in on the girl.
Today, if a parent got a set of photos like this, no one
would blame him or her for calling the police. Why does Sy do this, when he
seems decent enough so much of the time? One could suppose that maybe he wants
to get caught once he has come to terms, per his own lights, with Will Yorkin
and Maya Burson, but it’s unclear is this really is his motivation.
Sy is probably the saddest victim here
And we find late in the film—not
to give away too much—that Sy is as obsessive, and photo-conscious, as he is
because he himself, as he claims (we don’t see proof), has been subjected to
abuse as a child involving photography by his father. Viewers should compare
what he says to the main investigating police officer (Eriq La Salle) with what Sy subjected Mr. Yorkin and Maya
Burson to in the hotel room.
And thus, Sy seems “totally gone
weird” in the police interrogation room, which is sterile white, with his arraying
before him, like a bunch of solitaire cards, photos he took at the hotel of the
climax of the story, odd photos of random sights in his hotel room. This is something
a little kid or an eccentric might do. But instead of seeming like the
creeping-out Norman Bates at the end of Psycho,
who is wrapped in a blanket in a police holding cell with his thoughts voiced
in a Mrs. Bates old-woman’s manner, we actually feel for Sy in his own
police-station anticlimax. He seems, to adapt a line from King Lear, “more
sinned against than sinning.” This film ends up decrying not so much the depredations
of a stalker in the form of Sy Parrish, as it does the victimization of a guy
like Sy, not least by the image-conscious and depersonalizing nature of modern
American society.
And what helped bring this off
is Williams’ quiet, competent, winning acting.
