Yesterday morning, while getting ready to go to work, I caught a replay of Gus Van Sant's Good Will Hunting on TV. It was the film that launched Matt Damon and Ben Affleck into the Hollywood stratosphere, and which featured a performance by Robin Williams that earned him his first and so far only Academy Award. It was a nuanced, troubled and ultimately inspired portrayal of a world-weary psychiatrist who sees in Matt Damon's prodigy Will Hunting a new challenge and someone who badly needs his help. To be honest, as impressive as Damon's career-making performance was, it was Williams who really stole the show for me.
Inevitably, I asked myself "what's he done lately?" and to my dismay, the almost universally panned 2009 film Old Dogs came to mind, as did a number of other films that were either critically panned, largely ignored at the box-office, or both. His most high-profile role in the last ten years has been as the magically animated wax statue of Theodore Roosevelt in 2006's Night at the Museum, which was pretty much a supporting role. Williams hasn't anchored a major financial success since 1998's Patch Adams.
There are a number of iconic actors who made a huge impact on pop culture in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s who have started to flounder in the new millennium, a topic which could cover an entire post (or something much longer) all on its own, but Williams' fall from grace is particularly disturbing to me because I grew up on his work. I was a fan of the TV show Mork and Mindy in the late 70s and early 80s, and when Williams moved on to motion pictures I was fond of those too, from Moscow on the Hudson to the highly-acclaimed Good Morning Vietnam. Dead Poets Society , which was one of the defining films of my youth and which still moves me when I see it today, is still hailed as one of the most inspiring films of all time by the American Film Institute. In films like this and in the also highly moving Awakenings, in which he co-starred with Robert De Niro, Williams showed he could do serious roles every bit as effectively as he could comedic ones. The man was really incredible; between 1988 and 1992 he scored three Academy Award Nominations for Best Actor in a Leading Role, for his performances in Vietnam, Poets and the very stylish Terry Gilliam dramedy The Fisher King, another film starring Williams that I loved. I was even a fan of his work on Steven Spielberg's Hook, for all the lambasting it received from critics.
Williams good form continued throughout the 1990s, with the commercial hit Mrs. Doubtfire, and the Mike Nichols comedy The Birdcage. Williams showed remarkable versatility even in his comedy; he went for zany in Doubtfire, but in Birdcage played the "straight man" in the gay relationship between his character and that of Nathan Lane.
When Williams finally won his Oscar in 1998 for Good Will Hunting, for me it was a bright spot in a year dominated by the thoroughly depressing Titanic and it was easy to root for his success. Apart from giving a brilliant performance for GWH, Williams had, with his performances, his stand-up routines, and his generally pleasant demeanor in interviews, established himself as kind of an everyman, someone one would want to succeed. The guy was obviously a top-tier moviestar by then but he didn't come across as one, at least not to me.
After that, Williams seemed to go through a strange phase where he was attracted to bad guy roles. He played two in succession back in 2002, first in Christopher Nolan's Insomnia, then in Mark Romanek's One Hour Photo. I figured it was a phase, that after it didn't work out we'd be back to more of the high-quality laughs we were accustomed to getting. I was confident that at some point we would once again be seeing Williams in films that were both smart and funny.
It didn't happen. Apart from the odd art house film that didn't even show up in theaters over here, Williams came up with stinkers like RV, License to Wed and the aforementioned Old Dogs, which was apparently so bad that Disney, who released it, nixed plans for a sequel to the successful 2007 film Wild Hogs (which didn't star Williams), for no other reason than that they shared the same director and had similar sounding titles.
So what I'd really like to know is: what happened? Did people just get tired of Williams? Did his ability to tell good scripts from bad ones diminish with old age? Did he fall under some horrible curse after he divorced his Filipina wife? Is this some kind of Oscar winner's curse?
One could ask similar questions about fellow Oscar-winner Al Pacino, who went from Scarface and Michael Corleone to playing a sex-crazed version of himself in Adam Sandler's last stinkfest Jack and Jill, but Robin Williams, first as Mork then later as a bona fide movie star, wasn't just an icon for film buffs, he was at one point a seemingly permanent fixture on the pop-culture landscape with a string of commercial and critical successes throughout the late 80s and early to mid 1990s. He was the voice of the Genie in Aladdin for gosh sakes!
His career didn't exactly implode in the same way that Mel Gibson's did though I have read some reports of alcoholism, but in some ways I'm not sure if what's happened to Williams isn't somehow worse than what's happened to Gibson, who even in his ruination is still the object of much public fascination. Williams' star simply appears to have faded. I hear he's doing well with stand-up routines, but his is a talent that, to my mind, should be shared with audiences everywhere, not just comedy club patrons.
Of course, there's nothing I can do about the state of the man's movie career, but I certainly wish him well. Like I said, I grew up with his work; I've been inspired by him. Judging by the careers of actors like Paul Newman, Burt Lancaster, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon and many others, Williams still has some good years left, and I hope he spends them entertaining a whole new generation of filmgoers, who deserve better from him than garbage like Old Dogs.
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