“Insomnia” (2002)
Overshadowed a little at the time by “Memento,” which preceded it and subsequently by the blockbuster “The Dark Knight” franchise that followed, “Insomnia” has remained slightly overlooked within Christopher Nolan’s canon. But Williams’ demise is almost certain to go some way toward addressing that: his performance here is the quiet, atypical, black heart of a clever, absorbing exercise in mood. It’s a film that the passage of time has done little to tarnish, with Williams’ third-act appearance retaining its surprise power, and the doppelganger-style mind games he plays with Al Pacino’s craggily sleep-deprived, compromised detective proving as riveting an onscreen face-off as Pacino has ever been involved in. But if Williams had done “serious” before, he’d never really played straight-up bad, evil or creepy (though he’d go on to do that occasionally in films like “One Hour Photo”) and what’s so shocking about this portrayal is how quickly the “hey I can’t believe they cast Robin Williams as a villain!” effect wears off and how soon you become mesmerized by how chillingly he embodies the monstrous, self-justifying murderer Finch. Bleak, spare and almost nihilist, the film’s atmosphere of myopia and incipient madness admits very little levity or optimism into its cold white Alaskan landscapes, and what little there is is not accorded to Williams’ character. It makes it a film that feels like entirely the wrong one to watch today, or tomorrow or maybe even next week, but it’s a performance that will soon take its place as possibly the greatest of Williams’ purely dramatic turns, a register he mastered as fully as comedy, but in which he never got to work enough. Other films remind us of what a beloved entertainer we have lost; “Insomnia” reminds us that an actor of enormous range has left us too.
“Good Morning, Vietnam” (1987)
For those of us who grew up in the 1990s, it’s hard to imagine that Williams’ movie career got off to a rocky start in the eighties. Big-screen debut “Popeye” flopped, and aside from the moderately well-received “The World According To Garp,” subsequent appearances in the likes of “The Survivors,” “Seize The Day” and “The Best Of Times” mostly went ignored. ‘Good Morning Vietnam’ changed everything, though: Barry Levinson‘s wartime comedy was a smash hit, and earned Williams a Best Actor Oscar nod. The secret? Letting Williams off the leash in a role —Armed Forces Radio Service DJ Adrian Cronauer, who heads to Vietnam to raise the troops’ morale and irritate the top brass— that he was born to play. Reportedly Mitch Markovitz‘s script didn’t contain any of Cronauer’s on-air riffs, with Levinson simply asking that it read, “Robin does his thing.” And boy, does he: the film stands as the one that best captures Williams’s million-miles-a-minute, multi-voiced improvisational riffing, Levinson harnessing his energy and driving the entire movie forward with it. It’s one of the finest comic performances of the last thirty years, but Williams, who’d always effectively leavened his comedy with pathos on screen even in questionable films, carries off the more dramatic moments just as effectively. Perhaps more than anything else here, this isn’t just a film thatfeatures a brilliant performance from the star: the film is a brilliant performance from the star. Everything else is window dressing.
“World’s Greatest Dad” (2009)
Given the circumstances of Williams’ passing, it’s going to be a while before we’ll be comfortable rewatching ‘World’s Greatest Dad.’ But the now-doubly-queasy nature of the material hopefully won’t cast too long a shadow, given that it features one of William’s most nuanced and understated performances, and probably the finest among his late-period work. Directed by comic-turned-filmmaker Bobcat Goldthwait, it’s a tough, jet-black Solondzish comedy about a mild-mannered, harried teacher/ frustrated novelist (Williams) and his unpleasant, sex-obsessed prick of a son. When he returns home to find that his offspring has expired in an autoerotic accident, he fakes a suicide note to save embarrassment, only for the note (and a subsequent faux-journal) to suddenly win literary acclaim. The film’s savage skewing of the culture of posthumous sanctification is sharp, if even more uncomfortable today, but it’s Williams who stops it slipping into pure misanthropy. As restrained and toned-down as he’s ever been, he plays a man of multitudes: one capable of (initially, at least) capitalizing on his grief, and yet one who genuinely, despite himself, loved his vicious child, and steps up to become a pariah when the boy’s name and memory becomes hijacked. The film’s imperfect, but Williams here blends the darkness of his other ’00s work with his more touching performances from the 1990s to create something that should serve as a monument to his talents, even as the sad coincidence of the subject matter stands beside it.
