Blu-Ray Review: One Hour Photo

By Less Lee Moore

I saw One Hour Photo when it was released in theaters in 2002. I’ve never forgotten it.

It was the first film I saw with Robin Williams playing against type as a truly disturbed character. Even 1991’s The Fisher King was Disney compared to One Hour Photo.

Writer and director Mark Romanek cut his filmmaking teeth on music videos for Nine Inch Nails, Madonna, Michael and Janet Jackson, and Fiona Apple. With the success of filmmakers like David Fincher, the stigma of transitioning from music videos into feature films has thankfully diminished. For a first feature, One Hour Photo is astonishing, but it would still be were Romanek a veteran.

All the elements in One Hour Photo synthesize to create an unsettling, compelling, and at times, frightening portrait of Seymour “Sy” Parrish, an employee at the one-hour photo lab of SavMart, a fictionalized version of Target or Wal-Mart. Sy becomes obsessed with the Yorkins, a family who has been dropping off their film at SavMart for almost a decade. Intriguingly, Romanek mentions in several of the Blu-Ray’s special features that his fascination with these kinds of superstores was the genesis for the film, not Sy’s pathology.

In the decade since the movie’s release the glamour of such places has worn off considerably, but in One Hour Photo they are stylized, idealized. There is a certain sense of nostalgia now, even though I’ve never seen a store as beautifully appointed as this SavMart. Romanek, along with production designer Tom Foden, art director Michael Manson, and set decorator Tessa Posnansky actually created the SavMart in an old Office Depot, so they were able to make it as perfect as they wanted, even with the relatively miniscule 2002 budget of $12 million (consider that Michael Bay’s “low-budget” Pain & Gain cost twice that).

In the settings of SavMart, Sy’s apartment, and the Yorkin family home, One Hour Photo reveals how the production team was superb at utilizing color as a narrative tool, but certainly much of this can also be attributed to Romanek’s distinct vision. For such a modest budget, One Hour Photo looks amazing: at once bland and incredibly specific. Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, who would later lens Fight Club as well as Fincher’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, crafts a dreamlike, yet sharply focused vision out of the banal, through strict framing and leisurely, yet tightly controlled camera movements.

These are all, of course, metaphors for Sy’s outer and inner lives: fanatical attention to detail masking inner chaos. As Sy, Robin Williams is remarkable. His disappearance into the character goes beyond hair color and glasses. Every gesture, every facial expression is perfect at conveying Sy’s emotional tightrope act and eventual fall from his own constructed grace. In this way, the film seems to predict the emotional trajectory of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler.

From the beginning of the film, we sense that something is very, very wrong and we remain increasingly uncomfortable as things progress. Granted, opening the film with Sy’s arrest is a big clue, but not one that could prepare us for the depths that the movie plunges us into by the end. The wonderful score, from Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimak (The International) ably assists in discomfiting us throughout. Despite the intervening years and trends, One Hour Photo‘s score seems just as vividly upsetting now as it did then, a clear inspiration for the scores in later psychological thrillers.

From Sy’s first interaction with Nina Yorkin and son Jake, we know things are amiss, but we’re never sure where they’re headed, even when we think we are. When Sy gives Jake a toy he’s purchased for him, the setting couldn’t be more pastoral, as the golden glow of afternoon sunset dances on the vivid greens of trees and grass. Yet Sy doesn’t quite fit. As Jake, Dylan Smith is as real as child actors get, politely declining because his parents wouldn’t let him accept such a gift. It isn’t until we see Sy, alien and alone, under the tree that we consider how things could have gone and wonder if Jake is Sy’s real interest in the Yorkin family.

The metaphor of photography is at once obvious and subtle, but never feels forced. “No one ever takes a photograph of something they want to forget,” Sy intones in the beginning. We won’t grasp the full breadth of this until the last scene of the film, but it provides a powerful, warning undercurrent throughout. Clues are dropped along the way and as each puzzle piece is revealed we travel through embarrassment, sympathy, horror, and pity.

The close-up of Sy’s hamster in the glass cage, eagerly drinking water from the dispenser as Sy watches is one of the most heartbreaking scenes in a film filled with heartbreak. Recalling such moments as the credits roll is a testament to Romanek’s skill at creating such a meticulously realized portrait and Williams’s gift at thoroughly inhabiting someone who is, after all, a shell of a real human being.

In the interim since the film’s release, we have, on societal and individual levels, come to an increasing awareness of how stalking is manifest through the perfidious nature of digital photography and social media. Despite the fact that One Hour Photo relies so heavily on print photography, which is dying both artistically and commercially, there is nothing antiquated about this film. It feels as palpably horrible as it did a decade ago, because such bad things not only still happen, they seem to happen with alarming frequency. Although the idea for One Hour Photo may have started with a faceless behemoth of bricks and mortar, the lingering emotional stain is its true legacy.

One Hour Photo was released on Blu-Ray through Twentieth Century Fox Home Video on May 7. The film’s visual transfer is immaculate and the sound exquisite.

Special features include commentary by Romanek and Williams; a revealing, frequently hilarious interview with Romanek and Williams on The Charlie Rose Show; a Cinemax featurette; and a delightfully detailed featurette that aired on the Sundance Channel called “Anatomy of a Scene.” There are also three TV spots and the original theatrical trailer, all of which seem rather spoiler-happy in retrospect.

Romanek has also personally curated several excellent new special features. There’s a Main Title Test; a VFX breakdown of “Sy’s Nightmare Elements”; in-depth storyboards; a revealing featurette called “Lensing One Hour Photo“; and my favorite, cast rehearsals with Dylan Smith, Robin Williams, Connie Nielsen, Michael Vartan, and Gary Cole. These are fascinating in terms of watching actors just doing their thing as well as witnessing the development of how the characters would eventually be fully realized on screen.