When actor and comedian Robin Williams passed away in August, I had the same two reactions I imagine most of his other fans had. First, I was taken completely by surprise. Williams was only 63 and he was making just as many new movies and tv shows as he ever did. He was an active athlete and obviously a vibrant, energetic performer. My second reaction was that I was genuinely sad.
In our celebrity-saturated culture, famous people pass away pretty regularly, and I’m not the type to get misty about it. But Robin Williams was different. Mork and Mindy was appointment viewing for my family when I was a kid in the late seventies. As a teenager, I spent many late nights huddled around a stereo in my older brother’s room with the volume turned low as we listened to Williams’ manic, profane, and utterly hilarious comedy albums on cassette. Loving his comedy work as much as I did, I was thrilled when I discovered his roles as a dramatic actor when I was an adult. In short, Williams and his work have been a part of my life for literally as long as I can remember.
In terms of his movie roles, of course everyone knows and loves the big ones – Good Morning Viet Nam, Mrs. Doubtfire, Dead Poets Society, Good Will Hunting – he has been praised extensively for his work in these movies and rightfully so.
But to remember and pay tribute to him, I wanted to recommend a film featuring Robin Williams that maybe you haven’t already seen, something lesser known that still demonstrated his singular talent.
And so I suggest Kenneth Brannagh’s 1991 neo-noir Dead Again. When the film was made, Brannagh was hot off the success of his Oscar-nominated version of Henry V. He was still in his twenties when he adapted, directed, and starred in the film and was being compared to Lawrence Olivier and Orson Welles. He could have made any film he wanted to for his next project, and he chose to direct a cinematic love letter to Los Angeles, film noir, Hitchcock, and classical Hollywood. It was an unexpected choice and critics were divided over the movie’s success. Love it or hate it, Dead Again definitely cooled some of the genius talk that had surrounded his career to that point.
The film has Brannagh’s world weary private eye Mike Church investigating the identity of a mystery woman who suffers from violent dreams. The woman, played by Brannagh’s then-wife Emma Thompson may or may not be a reincarnated murder victim from fifty years before. The story shifts back and forth from present day to the 1940s when the murder in question took place, and the flashbacks are shot in rich, nuanced black and white while modern sequences are in color. The film’s plot centers around who the mystery woman really is (or was) and Mike Church’s relationship to her. It’s a Hitchcockian conceit that pays tribute to Vertigo, and other thrillers in which the sanity of one of the main characters is central to the conflict of the story.
One brilliant choice Brannagh did make was casting Robin Williams in a small role as Cozy Carlisle, a disgraced psychiatrist who was fired for sleeping with patients and now works in the produce section of a seedy Los Angeles grocery store. Mike Church initially finds Carlisle for a client but eventually goes to back to consult with him over the case of the mystery woman. Williams only has two scenes and spends less than five minutes total onscreen, but those few minutes are spellbinding. Cozy Carlisle is bitter, profane, and occasionally volcanically angry at his self-inflicted fate. His face, his voice, his posture – everything about him conveys his resentment and anger. His twitchy unpredictability rises off him like heat. People often forget that Williams was a formally trained Julliard graduate, but his brief, powerful cameo in Dead Again reemphasizes that not only was the man titanically funny, but he was a sharp, impactful dramatic actor as well.
The rest of Dead Again is a fun, sometimes uneven grab bag of old Hollywood homage and Shakespearian actors speaking with Los Angeles accents. The movie is worth a look on its own merits, particularly the lovely black and white cinematography during the 1940s flashback sequences. But if nothing else, see it for Robin Williams’performance, short as it may be. William’s part in the movie, like his role in life, was memorable, unexpected, and unfortunately all too brief.
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