Some of the best actors make the worst movies. Robin Williams, who killed himself Monday, made clunkers like Popeye, Bicentennial Man, What Dreams May Come, and Jumanji. But that isn’t a difference between Williams and actors of similar caliber such as Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. It’s a similarity.
Pacino’s last good turn was as Shylock in the 2004 Merchant of Venice. He’s been in dreck ever since. De Niro was excellent in Silver Linings Playbook, and had an enjoyable cameo in American Hustle. But one has to go back to the late 1990s to find this greatest of American actors in roles commensurate with his talent: Ronin (1998), Jackie Brown (1997), Marvin’s Room (1996). The unevenness of an actor’s resume is not a judgment against him. It’s confirmation that film is a collaborative enterprise.
What distinguishes Williams from Pacino and De Niro is the arc of his career. They came to prominence in dramatic roles, but have spent much of the last decade playing for laughs or parodying the mannerisms that made them famous. Williams began in comedy. His standup, a sort of experiment in what would happen if you took Jonathan Winters and injected him with adrenalin, remains a thrilling experience, a rapid-fire verbal cartoon in which Williams plays all of the parts and invents the plot as he goes along. He found a mass audience by playing the lead in a sitcom, Mork & Mindy. When audiences remember Williams, they will recall Aladdin, Mrs. Doubtfire, The Birdcage, maybe Flubber. All are funny.
The comedies alternated with the tragi-comic dramas for which Williams won an Oscar and critical respect. But it was only in 2002, toward the end of his career, that Williams showed audiences his true range, playing disturbed losers in One Hour Photo, Death to Smoochy, and Insomnia. In 2009, he starred in The Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, a well-reviewed stage production about the legacies of the second Iraq war. At a time when Pacino and De Niro were descending into caricature, Williams was showcasing new aspects of his talent.
The typical Williams character was an outsider. Sometimes, like in Mork & Mindy, he was literally an alien. At other times, like in Moscow on the Hudson, he played an immigrant. He was a mad man (The Fisher King), a grown-up Peter Pan (Hook), a gay man (The Birdcage), a fast-aging child (Jack), and a robot (Bicentennial Man). His specialty was playing characters at the margins of their profession: the DJ in Good Morning Vietnam, the itinerant teacher in Dead Poets Society, the doctor who tends to locked-in cases in Awakenings, the out-of-work voice actor in Mrs. Doubtfire, the MIT-trained psychiatrist who teaches at a community college in Good Will Hunting, the unconventional Patch Adams.
Williams relished playing outsiders because he was one himself. He was a chubby kid who learned that the best way to befriend kids at school was to make them laugh. He grew up in San Francisco surrounded by eccentrics and hippies and artists. He was a progressive who starred in the feminist World According to Garp, in an antiwar movie, in a children’s movie about divorce, and in the first mainstream comedy featuring gay characters.
He was a rebel hero in Dead Poet’s Society, inspiring his students with visions of art, poetry, Eros, the humanities, and self-creation. So charismatic was Williams as Professor John Keating that audiences don’t see the expulsion and suicide that mark the film’s conclusion as an indictment of student rebellion or romantic self-discovery. They choose to see the loyalty and passion Keating inspired in his pupils stamped down by an oppressive system.
Williams was one of the greatest movie speechmakers. Perhaps it was his talent as a stage actor and standup comic that gave him the ability to hold the attention of distracted film audiences. Perhaps it was the unpredictability of his speech: the way it veered from reference to reference, from comedy to drama, from accent to accent. There are funny monologues in Good Morning Vietnam and Aladdin. There are serious monologues in Dead Poets Society and Good Will Hunting. There is the heartbreaking monologue at the end of Mrs. Doubtfire in which Williams, as the Doubtfire character, addresses a child whose parents have divorced. There is a chilling speech Williams delivers in Insomnia, in which he taunts a detective, played by Al Pacino, to accuse him of murder, and reveals his knowledge that the detective also has secrets he does not want revealed. The speech lasts the duration of a ferry ride in Alaska. It’s gripping.
When audiences return to Williams’s movies, they won’t be looking for individual movies. They will be looking for individual speeches, moments when Williams’s voice and magnetism is electric, when this troubled old soul conveys the heights of human aspiration and the depths of human sorrow. It’s the power of these moments that place Williams in the company of the greatest movie actors.
The list of classic Robin Williams is long. It stretches from Garp to Insomnia, and includes some of his televised comedy specials. And yet, if I had to choose the Williams movie whose immortality is assured, it would be Aladdin (1992). Not the greatest of Disney films, it is nonetheless one of Williams’s best performances.
What makes Aladdin special is that it is the first movie in which Williams is liberated from the constraints of physical space. As the genie, Williams can do anything. No facial expression or physical slapstick is out of bounds. He displays his full spectrum of voices, and the animators create a suitable costume for each. This is the first children’s movie in which someone imitates William F. Buckley Jr. And children, not knowing who Buckley is, are delighted.
In some ways Robin Williams was always the genie, able to make us smile and tear up, able to transport us from everyday life into the unreal world of film. Like the genie, Williams appeared every now and then, fulfilling our wish for laughter, for escape, for understanding. Then he would disappear.
Robin Williams escaped the material world in Aladdin, and now he is loosed from ordinary time. But the greatness of film—and one of its dangers—is that it is timeless. Robin Williams is still alive in his films. The genie will return.