Missing Robin Williams
Being a prolific film critic is like being a veteran congressperson in that there is a long, exceedingly public record of opinions you have expressed that may no longer reflect your current mindset or the tenor of the times. Hell, some of these opinions might even embarrass the living hell out of you.
For example, during the eighteen years I spent as a full-time film critic for The A.V Club and The Dissolve I reviewed a lot of Robin Williams movies and the occasional stand-up comedy special and I was overwhelmingly scathing and negative in my treatment of Williams as a comic actor and comedian.
Granted, that is in no small part because Robin Williams made a lot of movies that are as objectively close to terrible as possible, real stinkeroos like Jack, Father’s Day, Patch Adams and Bicentennial Man. But I didn’t just criticize the movies: I panned the man as well. I found him annoying and empty, in perpetual need of validation and attention and insatiable in his desperate hunger for the audience’s love. I depicted Williams as hackneyed and maudlin, stereotype-loving and stickily sentimental.
I’ve always been a fan of Robin Williams as a dramatic actor, the more muted and understated the better, but whenever Williams would do his Robin Williams shtick, you know, the one that brought happiness and laughter to generations and made him a legend the world over, I would snort derisively, roll my eyes and get out the old poison pen.
Then Williams died and all of the things that bothered me about him stopped seeming important. My strongly held former conviction that Williams was not funny ceased to matter. What was important was that Williams was famously a kind man, and a sweet man, and a funny man who brought joy and laughter into an often cold and brutal world. He was a man who was in a lot of pain that ultimately proved overwhelming.
I stopped looking at Williams as a performing monkey whose antics did not meet my personal standards and started seeing him as a human being. I stopped being a hater and became an appreciator.
When I find myself thinking about Williams these days, something I do a shocking amount, it’s always with tremendous affection, even love. I’ll think about his voice, and his galloping rhythms and the kindness of his face and the radiance of his beatific smile. And I’ll feel sad and happy at the same time, sad because he’s gone but happy because he did so much while he was here.
I think sometimes about what Williams’ act would be like today. I wonder what he would make of Donald Trump as president and how he would deal with COVID-19 and the quarantine. A comic voice I did not care for at all during his lifetime I now find myself missing on a regular basis.
Death has completely changed the way I see Williams. It hasn’t just softened the edges, it’s done away with them completely.
The irritation I felt towards Williams almost instantly dissipated upon learning of his death. Knee-jerk negativity of the “He’s overrated” variety was replaced by appreciation both for what Williams contributed to the world during his eventful lifetime and what he meant to people of my generation, who saw him as both a cuddly, bear-like idealized father figure and a secret friend, an adult with the irrepressible joy of a child.
That seems strangely apt since one of my all-time favorite Williams’ performances, if not my single favorite Williams movie, is Bobcat Goldthwait’s heartbreaking, tender and wise 2009 dark comedy World’s Greatest Dad.
In Goldthwait’s cult classic, Williams plays a teacher and frustrated wannabe author who channels his professional, emotional and creative energies into writing a fake suicide note and then a fake journal for his 15 year old son Kyle (Daryl Sabara) after he accidentally kills himself via autoerotic asphyxiation that changes the way the teenager is perceived by casting him as a sensitive, eloquent soul whose angst and voice resonate with his peers and the world at large.
The difference is that Kyle is a belligerent asshole his over-compensating father projected all manner of wonderful qualities onto, whereas Williams genuinely contained a giddy abundance of positive attributes like gentleness, curiosity, generosity, wit and sensitivity.
Robin Williams was a great man, and a legendary performer whose work continues to mean so much to so many people but it took death for me to understand his brilliance and incalculable value as a performer as well as a human being.
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