by Dave Itzkoff
The film did poorly, but Robin was unbowed. “I don’t need the coin,” he said. “I keep working because projects are interesting or very bizarre, which I like. I’m exploring, finding humanity. I’m trying to play characters that allow us to look at who and what we are as a species.”
He pointed ahead just a few weeks to the impending release of Patch Adams, though he was at a loss to explain why it was the fifth film he’d made in eight years in which he played a physician. “Maybe it’s because I want to help people that I play so many doctors. And I like to put on rubber gloves.”
Patch Adams, whose production had bookended Robin’s Oscar-night triumph, elicited one of the most brutal critical responses of his career, and its title became a notorious shorthand not only for the bottom rung of Robin’s cinematic résumé but for the most misguided of any comic actor’s attempts to balance humor and pathos. To this day it is regarded as one of the worst films of its year and decade, and derided, as one typical assessment reads, for pandering “so shamelessly in an effort to manipulate every conceivable human emotion” as it “trots out every hoary plot device, no matter how improbable, exploitative or downright moronic.” Even the industry trade paper Variety called it “shamelessly sappy and emotionally manipulative” and said that it “pulls out all the stops in a lead role that gives him carte blanche to careen between extremes of silliness and sentimentality.” “Even so,” its review cautioned, “it’s unwise to underestimate the appeal of a popular star doing crowd-pleasing shtick in slickly packaged Hollywood hokum.”
Sure enough, Patch Adams was a number one film at the box office when it opened on Christmas Day 1998, but the damage was done. At the start of 1999, Robin discharged CAA, the Hollywood firm whose agents had represented him for many years, to follow Michael Ovitz and Michael Menchel to their new talent company, Artists Management Group, though David Steinberg and his partners at Morra, Brezner, Steinberg & Tenenbaum would stay on as his managers.
The theatrical release of Jakob the Liar followed a year later. Peter Kassovitz, the film’s Hungarian director and co-screenwriter, had survived World War II after being given refuge by a Catholic family and had been reunited with his parents after their release from a concentration camp. Much of its crew had been handpicked by Marsha, who was a credited producer on the project, and several of them were alumni of Schindler’s List who had been recommended by Steven Spielberg. This was payback of a sort from Spielberg, who had often phoned Robin during the making of Schindler’s List when his spirits needed lifting.
Haft, who had also been brought on at the Williamses’ request, saw the project as one that would simultaneously satisfy Robin’s desires to make a picture that was emotionally nourishing and commercially viable. “He and Marsha were looking for things that tamed the beast and touched his soul,” Haft said.
Thinking back to Dead Poets Society, Haft said that something was different about Robin during the making of Jakob the Liar. “There was a certain looseness to the guy that I knew on Dead Poets—an awareness of everything going on around him, from the morning news to the kind of personal encounters he had in life that he would carry around with him,” Haft said. On this picture “there was something more,” which Haft could only characterize as sadness. “The sadness did work in the role and contribute to it,” he said. “Robin could have done anything and yet he developed this project. And this project had a lot of resonance for him that was quite sad.”
But an unexpected development had complicated matters between the production of Jakob the Liar in the fall of 1997 and its opening in September 1999: the film had been eclipsed by Life Is Beautiful, an Italian comedy-drama directed by and starring Roberto Benigni. In this thoughtful and almost unerringly precise work of slapstick, Benigni played a Jewish man who during World War II is sent with his young son to a Nazi concentration camp. To shield his son from the horrors of their circumstances and keep them both alive, he convinces the boy that the camp is in fact an elaborate contest whose winner will receive a tank.
After Life Is Beautiful won the Grand Prix at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, it had a well-received theatrical release in America, and the following March it won three Academy Awards, including one for best foreign film and one for Benigni as Best Actor. Benigni, who was largely unknown to American audiences, clowned his way into their hearts by climbing atop the seats of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion en route to the stage to receive his first statuette. The media, striving for a metaphor that would make him more familiar, dubbed him “the Italian Robin Williams.”
The creators of Jakob the Liar said they had no idea about Life Is Beautiful at the time they were making their movie, and Robin—who had been one of the well-wishers who shook Benigni’s hand when he rushed down the aisle to pick up his second Oscar—tried none too convincingly to dismiss speculation that the success of Life Is Beautiful was bad for Jakob the Liar. “People say they’ve seen this before,” he said, just prior to his film’s release. “But how many police movies do we see every year? How many exploding asteroids? People can tolerate that, but they say, ‘Oh God, another Holocaust film. Can’t have that! Seen that!’”
His argument found little favor in the press, where comparisons to Life Is Beautiful ran rampant; one reviewer, who was giving Jakob the Liar a positive write-up, even called Robin “the American Roberto Benigni.” Kenneth Turan had now lost all patience with him; his pitiless evaluation began: “Robin Williams, enough already. Enough with the compassionate roles, the humanitarian roles, the caring and concerned roles. Enough with the good deeds, for pity’s sake. Remember being funny? Maybe you could try that again. How hard could it be?” The film was a crushing failure at the box office, taking in less than $5 million over a monthlong theatrical run.
The year was still not quite done with him. Just before Christmas, Robin starred in Bicentennial Man, a science-fiction movie in which he played an android who lives two hundred years in a quest to become fully human. The film (adapted from two novels, one by Isaac Asimov and the other by Asimov and Robert Silverberg) reunited Robin with Chris Columbus, who had directed him so capably in Mrs. Doubtfire; it was also astonishingly expensive, to the point that Disney had to put the project on a months-long pause when its budget hit $100 million. It was resuscitated when Columbia Pictures struck a deal with Disney to jointly finance, distribute, and market the movie.
The results, once again, were dissatisfying—so much so that critics were calling Robin’s entire oeuvre into question, even the past films that they’d previously given glowing appraisals. For one reviewer, Bicentennial Man illustrated how, over the past twenty years, Robin had carved out a genre of movies all to himself—an observation that was hardly meant as a compliment: “Call it hand-wringing drama in which the high-minded pathos never compensates for submerging Williams’ comic talents.” Bicentennial Man was another bust, bringing in just $58 million.
Robin knew he was alienating his fan base; he knew which movies in particular were driving the crowds away and which ones audiences hoped to see him replicate. But knowing this brought him no closer to solving the problem; as he saw it, he was at the mercy of the material that was being offered to him. “People keep saying, ‘Why don’t you do another Fisher King or Mrs. Doubtfire?’” he said. “But they don’t come along every day. I guess they wanted me to stop the touchy-feely movies after Awakenings. Then I did What Dreams May Come, which so many people really hated. And I can tell you making that movie was like having open-heart surgery with a spoon every day, so the reaction was dispiriting.”
His fans felt particularly empowered to tell him exactly how they felt and what they expected from him. “People will come up to you and say, ‘If you ever make another movie like that, I’ll hurt you,’” he said. “This is interesting feedback. Does it make me deny the validity of what I’ve done? No. Does it make me want to look for other things? Yes.”
But where others saw a calculated pattern of maudlin film roles, Robin explained that he was si
mply taking what was available to him. And on the level at which he operated, there was no option not to work at all. “I have been working straight for five years, only ever with a couple of months off in between,” he said. “It’s probably time to take more time off but then things come up and I do them because I feel there’s a challenge.”
In the winter of 2000, David Letterman, the late-night host, discovered that he had a severely blocked coronary artery and underwent quintuple bypass heart surgery. After several weeks of convalescence, Letterman returned to his desk at CBS’s Late Show for a celebratory, welcome-home broadcast; he brought out the team of surgeons and nurses who had tended to him and thanked them for their attentive care. Then, once that segment was over, there was only one celebrity entertainer that Letterman wanted to share his stage with on his first night back on television: Robin Williams.
Robin, who had flown out from San Francisco specifically to appear on the program, ran onto the stage dressed in surgical scrubs and rubber gloves, carrying an ice chest and a defibrillator. He accosted one of the stage managers, telling the man to turn his head and cough, then announced to Letterman’s studio audience, “Students, before we begin the penile reduction…” Finally he took his seat next to the host, who looked thin and delicate but had lost none of his acerbic wit. “It’s just nice to have you back,” Robin told him. “That’ll wear off,” Letterman replied.
“Are you all right?” Letterman asked him. “You seem like a pretty healthy guy.” With mock paranoia, Robin responded, “God, if it can happen to you, I’m next, I guess. I guess I’ll have to go in now, too.”
Letterman had needed some cheering up and concluded there was no one better qualified to provide it. “It was stressful and I was tired,” the host later said of the occasion. “I think people were worried: what if he has to be taken out mid-show? We don’t want him to have a heart attack and die. We were looking for something that I could curate rather than actually participate in. And it worked. Looking back on it—and God bless him for doing that—I don’t remember a single show where Robin didn’t end up with a standing ovation.”
But Robin needed that appearance as much as Letterman did; it had been a long time since he had been allowed to cut loose and laugh at himself, and to be appreciated for it.
As Robin saw it, there were only two movies he’d made up until now in which he’d played characters who could be classified as dark or villainous: one, a discredited ex-psychiatrist reduced to working as a grocery clerk in Kenneth Branagh’s 1991 film noir Dead Again; the other, a dapper, placid, bomb-building mastermind known only as the Assassin in Christopher Hampton’s 1996 adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Both were small, unbilled roles he’d taken for the simple pleasure of playing against the expectations of audiences—and the film industry—that considered him a milquetoast. “The idea of me doing this already starts people going, ‘Wait a minute,’” he explained. “I’ve only done warm, nice people, and already it puts people in an interesting mode—off-balance, which was great.”
Then in quick succession, he made three movies that he would call his “triptych of evil,” all of which would ask him to plumb his deepest, murkiest recesses. The first, One Hour Photo, which he filmed in the fall of 2000, was the feature directing and screenwriting debut of Mark Romanek, who had previously directed bleak, stylized music videos for Nine Inch Nails and Johnny Cash. The project was Romanek’s homage to the paranoid character pieces of the 1970s he’d grown up admiring, like Taxi Driver, The Conversation, and The Tenant; these films focused his imagination on the setting of a generic, suburban big-box retail store, awash in white fluorescent light, and the character of Seymour “Sy” Parrish, an isolated photo-lab employee who becomes dangerously fixated on a family whose pictures he develops.
Robin was intrigued by the possibility that he could cast aside the pressures that came with his usual, antic self and instead play someone so lacking in magnetism. “They’re no longer bound by the laws of likability,” he said. “You have a character that can be so normal—hyper-normal, and banal in many ways, that you no longer have to be charismatic.” Prior to the start of filming, which took place primarily at a closed-down Office Depot store in the Canoga Park section of Los Angeles, he trained one-on-one with a photo technician to learn to cut and print film. He watched taped interviews of convicted serial killers, and he consulted with a psychiatrist to learn about the distinguishing characteristics of mental conditions like autism and Asperger’s syndrome, whose symptoms, his notes indicated, include “a lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people.”
Romanek and Cheri Minns, Robin’s makeup artist, worked together to create a signature look for the Sy Parrish character, which included dyeing Robin’s hair blond, thinning it out, shaving back his hairline, and dressing him in large eyeglasses, to make him look older and more inconspicuous. Robin would later claim to be flattered by moviegoers who said that they didn’t recognize him in the role, but Minns said the opposite was true, that the anonymity of the character sometimes frustrated him. On one of the first days of the shoot, Minns said, “We’re walking to the set, in public. So we walked by a few people, and no one recognized him. Then it disturbed him. So the next people that walked by, he’s like, ‘Hi! How are you! Hi!’ ‘It’s me, it’s Robin Williams!’ He wouldn’t say that, but that’s basically what he was doing. He’d be like, ‘Hi!’ I’d say, ‘Jesus, Robin, you can’t stand it that two people don’t know who you are?’ It just really freaked him out, that people didn’t recognize him.”
At the start of 2001, Robin moved on to the second film in his unlikely trilogy, a pitch-black comedy called Death to Smoochy. Directed by Danny DeVito and set in a hypercompetitive pastiche of the children’s television industry, it cast Robin as Rainbow Randolph, the gaudy, singing, dancing, bowler-hatted host of his own top-rated kids’ TV show—who, behind the scenes, is Randolph Smiley, a cruel, cosseted, insecure celebrity who lives in a Manhattan penthouse, drinks heavily, spends profligately, and accepts bribes from parents who seek to get their eager moppets on his program. Having grown impatient with Randolph’s disgraceful ways, the president of his TV network (Jon Stewart) hits upon a low-cost solution: to replace him with Smoochy, a purple rhinoceros played by Sheldon Mopes (Edward Norton), a virtuous entertainer plying his trade in a Coney Island methadone clinic. As Robin’s character descends into anger, degradation, and revenge scenarios, the film handily earned its R rating with scenes in which he yells at a baby: “Hello, little nipple-nibbler, the rhino’s a Nazi!”; and tricks Mopes, on air, into serving children a batch of cookies shaped like penises. (“Welcome to Fatty Arbuckle land,” he grumbles to himself.) Robin called it “a wonderful, nasty movie.”
For the third and final film in this sequence, Robin traveled to British Columbia, Canada, to make the thriller Insomnia. Directed by Christopher Nolan, who had earned universal acclaim for his nonlinear murder mystery Memento, and adapted from a 1997 Norwegian film, Insomnia starred Al Pacino as Will Dormer, a Los Angeles police detective who is brought to an Alaskan town to help investigate the murder of a teenage girl. Even before Dormer’s investigations lead him to a prime suspect—a pulp novelist named Walter Finch, played by Robin—Finch taunts the detective with anonymous phone calls, delivered in a calm monotone, in which he alternately shares factual details and deliberate misinformation about the crime.
Nolan, who would later achieve blockbuster status with his Dark Knight franchise of Batman movies, felt that Robin’s outward congeniality would make him a more seductive murderer. “He presents the logic and the rationalization of the character in such a straightforward manner that you want to believe him for a while,” he said. “Dormer is in such a state by this point, you don’t quite know who to believe, and a lot of what Robin is saying makes a kind of sense, because he does it in this very straightforward and logical manner.”
Robin was again able to draw upon the serial-killer
research he had used for One Hour Photo, particularly a documentary he had watched about Jeffrey Dahmer. As he recalled, “They asked him, ‘When you started cutting up the bodies, what did you do?’ And he said, ‘I stored them in a case, exactly like that camera case right there.’ And you could see the interviewer go, [seizes up] ‘Okay, let’s cut. That’s it for today. Thank you.’”
When it comes to playing an unbalanced person, Robin said, “The more normal and regular it seems, the creepier it is.”
Crucial to Insomnia is its setting of a secluded fishing village where the sun does not set, and Robin filmed many of his scenes in the spring and early summer of 2001 in Port Alberni, a small city on Vancouver Island, and in tiny Alaskan towns on the Canadian border. Though the settings were beautiful, he also found them lonesome and limited in the kinds of stimulation they could offer. “There’s a lot of log rolling” and “a couple of bars,” he said.
He could eat only so many catered on-set meals before his attention and his appetite turned elsewhere. Explaining a local custom in which a bartender serves a shot of powerful grain alcohol and lights the leftover portion with a match, he said, “We had these wild parties in Alaska” where “they ‘Hyderize’ you there which is 175–180 proof. Do the math, that’s a lot of alcohol.”
Robin turned fifty years old on July 21, 2001, a milestone he celebrated with his family and friends on his ranch in Napa. He saw the moment as a dividing line in his career, and when he went past it, his days as a cinematic leading man were numbered. “Once I hit fifty,” he said, “I’m looking for characters. The romantic parts are over. ‘Mr. Pitt, he gonna take it now.’” With more sincerity, he said that he had “hit this phase where you look at stuff. The time is changing, you’re on the clock now. It’s like, ‘This is it.’ You want to maximize what you do.”