by Dave Itzkoff
If the anticipation was unbearable, the resolution was swift: in one of the first awards bestowed that night, Mira Sorvino, the presenter for Best Supporting Actor, opened the envelope and announced, “And the Oscar goes to … Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting!” With his customary speed, Robin sprang to his feet, kissed Marsha, kissed Laurie, went one row forward to embrace Damon and Affleck in a three-man bear hug, then bounded up to the stage to receive his trophy and make the acceptance speech he’d wanted to give for a decade or more.
He put his hand to his heart, blew a couple of kisses to the audience, then began:
Thank you. Oh, man. This might be the one time I’m speechless. Oh, ah—thank you so much for this incredible honor. Thank you for putting me in a category with these four extraordinary men. Thank you, Ben and Matt, I still want to see some ID. Thank you, Gus Van Sant, for being so subtle you were almost subliminal. I want to thank the cast and crew, especially the people of South Boston, you’re a can of corn, you’re the best. I want to thank the mishpucha Weinstein, mazel tov.
Robin started to choke up as he continued:
And I want to thank Marsha for being the woman who lights my soul on fire every morning, God bless you. [Here, a TV camera found Marsha in her seat, a tear streaming down her cheek.] And most of all, I want to—I want to thank my father, up there, the man who, when I said I wanted to be an actor, he said, wonderful, just have a backup profession like welding. Thank you. God bless you.
From the side of the stage, Crystal came over to Robin and they shared an affectionate embrace. “He saw me and he made this sound, like, ‘Oooooohhhh,’” Crystal recalled. “It was as if I had won, I was so happy for him.” Then Robin crouched low and did his best Groucho Marx–style duckwalk into the wings. A couple of quips, a large helping of sincerity, and that was it: the moment was over.
As rapidly as these events seemed to transpire in real time, Robin was experiencing them as if the record of his life was playing at half-speed. As he later explained, “Everything goes into this weird [here he made slow-motion noises] and you look around you and you see people you know. I remember seeing Burt Reynolds and he didn’t look happy.… I was like, sorry, dude, I didn’t know. And you go up there, and the next thing you know, you’re holding it.” He was so discombobulated that he neglected to mention Laurie in his acceptance speech. “I forgot to thank my mother, and she was there,” he said. “Even Freud would go, You must work on zis.”
Backstage, a euphoric Robin bantered playfully with reporters who held up numbered paddles to indicate they wished to ask him a question (“What am I bid?” he asked, pretending to be a haughty auctioneer. “We will pick 229, 229 … Who won the Volvo? Number 1523, yes”), then reflected on what the award meant to him. “It’s extraordinary,” he said. “It’s like, the golden dude. I’ve been here three times before and lost.… Basically, my odds before were the same as the Jamaican bobsled team winning.” But now that he had finally crossed that threshold, Robin said, “I’m sailing. Much cheaper than Prozac.”
Back at the ceremony, Robin got to see Affleck and Damon win their screenwriting Oscar; he mingled with Jack Nicholson, that night’s Best Actor winner (for As Good as It Gets), whom he’d often poked fun at in his stand-up but whom he regarded, deep down, as a godlike and nearly unapproachable presence; and he was able to join in an onstage portrait that gathered seventy living actors who’d received Academy Awards for their work. He found himself standing one tier in front of Shirley Temple Black, who leaned over and said, “Call me,” which so surprised Robin he could only think to respond, “Sure!” It was just a friendly gesture, but it made Robin realize he was truly part of something now, a pantheon of performers that was synonymous with Hollywood. The occasion bestowed legitimacy upon him and was a moment for reflection and reevaluation—an opportunity to forget about past missteps and wonder if some of his more maligned work was simply underappreciated. Even Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times critic who had not especially enjoyed Good Will Hunting, wrote in the aftermath of the show that Robin was “as well-liked a figure as today’s Hollywood has” and wondered why—even at a moment of maximum accomplishment—he was not being better served by the industry.
“For those who admire Williams’ unequaled genius as a comedian and are frustrated by the middle-of-the-road, tree-hugger roles he invariably takes in film,” his Oscar victory, Turan wrote, was an occasion for mixed emotions. “On the one hand, it was impossible not to appreciate and share in the pleasure Williams took in winning the Oscar, as well as the pleasure the film community felt in finally giving him one after three previous losses. But seeing the moments of manic comic brilliance … reinforced how unfortunate it is that that side of his ability rarely makes it on screen.”
Robin spent the night celebrating with Marsha, Laurie, and his new statuette at a party hosted by Vanity Fair. Arthur Grace, a photographer who followed him for the evening, later said that Robin “never let his Oscar out of his right hand, sometimes clutching it, sometimes cradling it, occasionally turning it, but mostly holding it firmly by his side.” He warmly received the good wishes of longtime friends and colleagues like Eric Idle and Jay Leno, and he accepted the awkward attention he got from hangers-on who just wanted to touch his trophy and the clothing executive who brazenly placed a brand-name beret atop Robin’s head.
After stopping at the annual Oscars party of the Hollywood socialite Dani Janssen to rub elbows with Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and Michael Douglas, Robin returned to his room at the Hotel Bel-Air and plopped his award down next to a deli bag from Junior’s. A nine-page log of congratulatory phone calls awaited him, received throughout the night from the babysitter who’d been watching Cody and Zelda (and who said they “jumped off the couch” and were “screaming and hugging”); from Valerie, Christopher Reeve, Chris Columbus, Pam Dawber, Steven Spielberg, Steve Jobs, Barry Bonds, Richard Lewis, Rick Overton, Richard Dreyfuss, his local post office, the veterinary hospital, and his auto mechanic. More personal notes came in the next day from Eric Idle (“What a joy to see you in full tears in full shot. Have no fears—all of America was crying too”), George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Anthony Hopkins, Oliver Sacks, and Ted Kennedy (who said that Good Will Hunting was “a favorite film of mine—and not entirely coincidentally because of its Boston connection”).
Sally Field wrote to say, “Every now and again the Oscar goes to the right person. You are one of those very right recipients.” And in a handwritten note, rendered in loopy cursive, Jeff Bridges said, “Dear Rob, Man!!! You won!! How fuckin’ great. I haven’t seen it yet (lost the video), but the clips look great.”
When it was over, the experience had been something like a wedding and a wake, all rolled into one. Every living person he cared about had sung his praises, paid their respects to him, and confirmed he was great at what he did. And then they moved on. What came next? For Robin, those next steps had been mapped out well in advance.
From the Bel-Air, Robin and Marsha went north, straight to the set of Robin’s new movie, on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. Outside a lecture hall, Alan Curtiss, the film’s first assistant director, was sent to intercept Robin before he could enter. “He had the Oscar in his hand,” Curtiss recalled, “and he said, ‘Alan, I want you to meet a new little friend of mine. I promised him I would give him a nice home.’ I said, ‘Robin, we’re just going to do a little rehearsal and then we won’t actually have to shoot until after lunch.’ He goes, ‘Okay.’” Then they stepped into the building, and the choir of the Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, whose members had been brought there just for the day, streamed into the room and began singing joyful gospel songs while the cast and crew celebrated with Robin.
“Tears came to his eyes,” Curtiss said. “It was a big, tiered lecture hall that went up like a stadium. He was down at the bottom, looking at everybody. I just remember seeing that smile and the glistening of his eyes, the tears of joy. We had a long lunch, ev
erybody took a few deep breaths, and then he went back to work that afternoon.”
That film was Patch Adams, a comedy-drama based on the doctor and founder of the Gesundheit! Institute, a hospital that combines humor and clowning with traditional medicine. The film was a commercial success when it was released that Christmas, but it was savaged by critics and disowned by the real-life Adams. (“I hate that movie,” he once told Roger Ebert.) For Robin, it was just one more sentimental feel-good role on a rap sheet that hardly needed any more of them. He had gone from a personal pinnacle back to rock bottom.
16
FADE TO WHITE
It was hardly what you’d call a synagogue, just a small room, about thirty feet by ten feet, off a dirt parking lot in the Polish city of Piotrkow. There was nothing on its outside to give away its identity except perhaps the spray-painted swastika on the door that was removed every few days, yet which always seemed to replace itself by the following morning. Inside the chamber stood a simple table and an unpainted, unvarnished cabinet that served as an ark, around which were gathered some forty worshippers attending their Yom Kippur services. The faithful, who read from photocopied prayer books sent from distant congregations in Ohio and Argentina, were a range of ages, from the youths who were just learning why they should not tell their neighbors they were Jewish, to the elderly who still bore the numbers that had been forcibly tattooed onto their arms. At the end of their High Holidays celebration in the fall of 1997, they were joined by a small group of American filmmakers and actors, including Robin, who had come to make a movie about the Holocaust.
A few months before Robin would return to America to reap the benefits of Good Will Hunting and win his Academy Award, he was here in this former Jewish ghetto to make Jakob the Liar. The film, adapted from the novel by Jurek Becker, tells of a Jewish shopkeeper living in Poland under Nazi occupation, who tries to rally his townspeople with fantastical, falsified tales of a radio he says he has and whose broadcasts predict their imminent rescue by a Soviet invasion force. It was by no means a comic subject; the story allowed only a certain kind of fatalistic humor, requiring Robin to keep most of his inventive impulses in check. This was not the kind of movie that anyone expected him to make, nor, as time would bear out, was it a movie he should have made for the good of his career. But it was one he felt he needed to make, and a case study in why he made the decisions that he did.
When audiences considered the highlight reel of Robin’s best-known roles, they saw doctors, teachers, fathers, helpers, and healers. “What everybody saw was Robin’s humanity,” said Steven Haft, his producer on Dead Poets Society and Jakob the Liar. “But that humanity was also a kind of ideology for him. Insofar as Robin could channel everything from a right-wing American president to a homeless guy in the street, he embraced the world in that way. All people, cultures—humanity as a kind of religion.” When Robin chose a part, there was usually something irresistibly personal about it. “It played to his humanity in one form or another,” Haft said, and in doing so, “he became very close with the character.”
“People expected too much of him,” Billy Crystal said. “They wanted him to plug that burst, that comet, into every movie, and it just wasn’t fair. Then, when he would do a more sentimental piece they would just crucify him as sappy, and it would crush him. He took that personally.
“When Robin chose to do something,” Crystal added, “he chose it for a particular reason. It was never a money decision, he had plenty of that. It was: Did it connect with his heart?”
On face value, there might seem to be little common ground shared by an impoverished, Jewish Holocaust victim and the Episcopalian son of a wealthy Midwestern automobile executive. But in his mind, Robin could justify it: he had grown up around Jews, worked with them, and embraced them as some of his closest friends; he liked to boast that he knew so much Yiddish, “people tend to think I’m Jewish.” He was fascinated with the otherness of Jews, admired them for their tenacity, and was furious with how they’d been treated by history. “He realized that Jews had come out of this crime against humanity,” Haft said, “and ‘crime against humanity’ is precisely the sort of thing that could reach deeply in Robin’s heart. You add it all up and there is a kind of, barely explicable, Jewish consciousness in this goy guy.”
Until now, there had been no compelling reason to call these instincts into question. Robin’s run of films from Mrs. Doubtfire to Good Will Hunting—occasionally acclaimed, usually successful—had bought him the breathing room to make one like Jakob the Liar every now and again. But his personal compass was about to lead him to some very despairing places, and to a series of characters who were increasingly hopeless, suffering, maladapted, even homicidal. In one far-flung science-fiction film from this period, called The Final Cut, he played a man who uses computers to edit postmortem memories, subjecting himself to lifetime after lifetime of other people’s acts of cruelty, infidelity, and violence. “It’s the way the world looks to me,” his character explains. “The way I see it.” But, as another character tells him, “You were meant to live your own life, too.”
What would be the cumulative effect on a sensitive, deeply attuned actor like Robin when each successive role brought him to further depths of anguish? “Was it following him down a wormhole of personal angst?” Haft wondered. Never mind what effect it had on his bankability or his bottom line—what did it do to his soul?
As Robin said of one such part he would play in this period, he was not interested in purely good or bad guys. He wanted to take on figures of elastic morality and see how much further he could stretch it. “It’s not black and white,” he explained. “There is this gray, going on constantly. A confusion, a doubt. A conscience being tweaked and pushed, back and forth. A man making a decision, going against his conscience and, in the end, hoping that he can find his way back.”
The first of Robin’s films to follow Good Will Hunting into theaters, almost a full year later, was a supernatural romance called What Dreams May Come. Adapted from a novel by the fantasy writer Richard Matheson, it told the story of Chris, a pediatrician (played by Robin), who helps his wife, Annie (Annabella Sciorra), a painter, overcome her depression after their children are killed in a car crash. But when Chris later dies in another car accident, Annie becomes despondent and commits suicide. Though Chris’s altruism gets him sent to heaven—a visually sumptuous afterlife that mirrors the paintings that Annie created—he learns that his wife has been condemned to hell for her suicide, and he sets out to rescue her.
Directed by Vincent Ward, a New Zealand filmmaker with a hallucinatory cinematic style, What Dreams May Come had been a costly undertaking, budgeted at $70 million, and the production traveled up and down California, to Venezuela, and to Glacier National Park in Montana during the summer and fall of 1997. Its creators believed that the film would counter a mood of existential uncertainty with optimism and a touch of the divine, offering what its producer Stephen Simon said was an “antidote” to a “millennium consciousness” that was “generally negative and fear-based. People are really looking for some hope and empowerment that can lift them beyond their fears.” Though the film was careful not to include or exclude God in its depiction of the hereafter, it offered Robin an opportunity to contemplate what role spirituality played in his life and what kind of judgment might await him at the end of it. “Do I attend church every Sunday?” he said. “No. Do I try and lead a fairly Christian life? Yes. Have I ever had any inappropriate behavior? Yes, years ago.” With a ribald reference to Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, he added, “Have I messed up any dresses? No.”
These jokes were a way for Robin to deflect some very real pain he had felt in making the movie, a story of separation, loss, suicide, and actual hell. “It was an emotional film and he had to reach some places that were difficult for him,” said Cheri Minns, his makeup artist. The material extracted a psychic toll on his costars, too, and Robin often found it easier to attend to their pain than to his own
. “What he would tend to do,” Minns said, “is he would go into a protective mode for them, and lose his own difficulties in the process. He would champion Annabella and coddle her and try to make everything good for her, and it would lessen what he was going through, because he would give so much energy over to that. That’s how he was.”
What Dreams May Come, which opened in October 1998, worked for some critics and not others, but few failed to observe that it fit into a pattern Robin had established over the past decade. Carrie Rickey of the Philadelphia Inquirer had some skepticism about the film—“If it doesn’t choke you with emotion, it will choke you with atmosphere,” she wrote—but praised Robin’s performance as part of a larger continuum. “From The Fisher King through Mrs. Doubtfire and Good Will Hunting, the actor has vividly dramatized various ways of working through loss,” she said. In What Dreams May Come, he was something like a modern-day Dante, “guiding us mortals through the rings of hell” in a story where “death and loss make his characters belatedly understand the gift of life.”
Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times critic who had never fully come around on Good Will Hunting, was even more dismissive, writing that Robin had turned in “one of his trademark lachrymose performances,” and, despite his recent accomplishments, “the awkward truth is that he is a brilliant comedian who is no more than a passable actor and whose determination to indulge a personal sweet tooth for schmaltz represents one of the most visible wastes of genius around.”