Friday, August 15, 2014

Film Friday: Robin Williams

Robin Williams died four days ago, and in today's "news cycle," that's a damn eternity, even as more recent revelations that he was in the early stages of Parkinson's have come out, along with unequivocal statements that he was sober at the time of his suicide.

I have remained quiet on the death of this mad genius, mainly because his death was unexpected, despite Williams' history of struggles with substance abuse.  (I was pretty quick to post something about James Garner's death, because I knew he'd been sick, and kind of knew what I was going to say before he'd died.) Williams' sudden death was something I needed to process, and still am processing.

My first thoughts were not nice ones. 

They were tied to the anger stage of grief, I suppose, though that would imply that I actually knew Williams well enough to feel grief.  (Some shrinks might say that grief is grief, but when we express grief for the death of a celebrity there has to be some sense of being at a remove, no?)  But I was thinking of another gifted actor we'd just lost too soon, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who, from my angle, threw his life away due to his heroin addiction. And I remember Williams' joke about cocaine being "God's way of telling you you have too much money," and wondered what drove this man to hang himself in despair. 

I thought of how many Americans killed themselves this week.  I don't have an answer at the moment. A quick Google search shows that 38 American soldiers committed suicide in July.  We're only talking about one American civilian.  That is to be expected in our media-saturated culture.  I have argued that in the media-world, the first person with HIV was Magic Johnson (not Arthur Ashe or Rock Hudson, both of whom died of AIDS before Magic was diagnosed as HIV-positive.), because that put the disease in a whole new frame of reference for Americans. Will Robin Williams' suicide do that for America when so many others' deaths did not (including the mass-murder suicides such as Adam Lanza, the Newtown massacre killer)?

What scares me is that Williams had so many resources at hand to fight his mental illness, and he had an awareness of his illness, unlike most Americans whose mental illnesses will go undiagnosed.  If he couldn't stop himself from suicide, what chances do those who can't afford a doctor have? I read a small article in the paper wherein a doctor suggested that the Parkinson's diagnosis probably did not  directly lead to Williams' suicide, since he was in its early stages and it would not have hampered him physically to the point where he'd have been frustrated enough.  As if someone who had never actually met the patient could be certain of this. 

As more information emerged, I began to reflect on my recent post about the relation between genius and madness; that Williams fit such a profile is not a surprise to anyone who had a copy of Reality -- What a Concept in the 1970s.  Playing Mork made perfect sense; Williams was not of this world in how he saw it. When Williams turned to film -- wrongly miscast in Robert Altman's Popeye --  he was often accused of having to "rope in" his anarchic talent, which is why he was praised so much for Good Morning, Vietnam, which allowed him to "be crazy" yet at the same time demonstrate his considerable acting talent.  (Lest we forget, the man trained at Julliard.)  

Such an assessment was never really fair, but it is true that many of his better written roles came after GMV, notably Good Will Hunting, for which he won his Oscar. (While his speech about love is probably his most remembered, the real acting came as he talked about the most famous moment in Boston Red Sox history prior to 2004, Carlton Fisk's home run in Game Six of the 1975 World Series; Williams was never a sports fan and comprehended just enough about sports to fake it for this moment.)  It was easy to sit back and enjoy Williams giving voice to the genie in Alladin, where he could pretty much go all out, but he could impress even in modulated roles like that of Dr. Oliver Sacks in Awakenings.  I actually think his performance in/as Mrs. Doubtfire is creepier than his role as the ostensibly creepy Sy in One Hour Photo.  His role in Death to Smoochy, as a fallen kiddie-show star, is wonderfully perverse, and one that has gone overlooked in all the comments and tributes I have seen.

Williams also made a lot of crappy movies, some unfunny comedies and a few overwrought dramas.  Par for the course if you stay long enough.  Was anyone watching his new sitcom?  That's not a rhetorical question or a snarky judgment; I have no idea.  Hist standup and talk show appearances are legendary, and YouTube has em all over the place.  There is a reason why Johnny Carson would ask him to be there on what would be his final "regular"-format of The Tonight Show (the last being just Carson and Ed and Doc talking about the show and saying goodbye).  He was an impossibly funny man, and like more than a few clowns, agonized inside, unable to believe in his talent, that he was good enough, like so many geniuses, unable to appreciate how special he was.



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