Voting for Robin Williams — sometimes

Toning it down helps
Then there’s “The World According To Garp” and “Jumanji,” two very different movies where Williams is the lone center of bewildered calm in a storm of chaotic humans (“Garp”) and chaotic storybook creatures (“Jumanji”). Because everything else in those films is a maelstrom — of characters cutting their own tongues off or running from giant computer-generated animals — Williams was directed toward or knew instinctively to tone it way down.

He also transformed physically for “Garp,” removing what seems to be about 20 square yards of of dense body hair, all the way down to the knuckles. That’s the moral equivalent of De Niro gaining 50 pounds to play Jake LaMotta. Did they shoot all his smooth-chested and shirtless scenes on the same day? Before noon? Most Williams haters I know will cop to liking “Garp” because it’s full of freaks. And “Jumanji” is a blast, the Sara Lee cake of movies. Nobody doesn’t like it.

“Moscow On the Hudson” is aging well enough, still able to trade on the sweetness of William’s fish-out-of-water Russian defector. But “The Fisher King” appears more and more wrinkly and flabby with every passing year, its late 1980s/early1990s rebel attitude looking slightly less cool than Andrew McCarthy’s outfits in “Less Than Zero” and Williams’ rapid-fire couch-chewing more and more exhausting and assault-like.

I watched it again recently and have come to the decision that it’s “Good Morning Vietnam” with more beard and body odor. You get the idea that he and Terry Gilliam had a great time when the cameras stopped rolling. In fact, you get the idea that Williams makes lots of people happy off camera most of the time, like he’s hired to be the director’s buddy. You have to wonder what someone like Stanley Kubrick could have done to Williams. Or even a hit-and-miss dictator like Lars Von Trier.

Learning to stretch
Mark Romanek’s “One Hour Photo” seems like the kind of film anti-Williams arthouse audiences would respond to positively and longtime fans would look at and think, “Yeah, I hate this movie.” It’s art-directed to hell and back, sterilizing everything in its fluorescently lit path, including Williams’ performance. He’s tight-lipped and clamped down tightly as a silently psychopathic drugstore film processor who surveillance-stalks a suburban family, everything human, including the hair on his head, bleached out and erased. It’s one-note, but at least it’s a note he hadn’t seen fit to play before then. “American Psycho” did it first and Michael Haneke’s “Cache” did it last, both of them better, but you have to give it — and its star — points for making the effort.

Did I say the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences was a bunch of dopes? They still are, but Williams more or less deserved his best supporting actor Oscar for “Good Will Hunting.” Less because of the to-the-tipping-point sentimentality of the final act, and more because of the open-hearted and mournful nature of Williams performance up to that point. I spent the whole film waiting for him to wink his wee widdle twinkly eyes at the camera, demanding I succumb to the hysterical phenomenon of the “male weepie,” but he didn’t. The script put some doofus words in his mouth, but he held them up higher than they deserved and sold them all.

He tried that again as a depressed gay radio host who befriends a mysterious child in this year’s indie “The Night Listener,” but that movie was such a wacked-out mess of post-JT Leroy paranoia that his efforts sank with the rest of the film.

So “Man of the Year” will come and go, hopefully unseen (like it matters — he and Barry Levinson use $50s for kindling) And it’ll be one more awful offering from an actor who knows better because he’s done better. And then later he’ll surprise us again, somewhere down the road. I’m guessing it won’t be in “Mrs. Doubtfire 2.” But somewhere.

Dave White is film critic for Movies.com and the author of “Exile In Guyville.” Find him online at www.imdavewhite.com.

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