When I found out that actor and comedian Robin Williams took his own life earlier this week I was in no position to post on this blog; I was out of town and hard at work. Even as I write this post, however I find myself grappling with what I want to say.
Two years ago I wrote a blog post lamenting the fact that Robin Williams career appeared to have been in the toilet well before he took his life two weeks ago. Basically, I was already mourning the fact that the guy's career was, for all intents and purposes, dead. I mean, this man was an Academy Award winner and starred in several movies that grossed well over $100 million at the American box office, back when those numbers actually meant something, and his most high profile role post-2000 was a bit part in a Ben Stiller movie? Ben Stiller would be lucky to even be a fraction of the comedian that Williams was in his heyday, especially considering he could never really expand his roles beyond that of the insecure short guy, though I suppose I should be glad that he at least threw Robin that bone. It was wrong to me on so many levels that audiences could basically turn their back on someone who had brought so much joy to so many people.
For me, the saddest thing is that the role which, it seems now, most closely approximated the loneliness Robin Williams felt inside, that of Sy Parrish, the shy, secretly obsessive photobooth attendant in One Hour Photo, was largely ignored by audiences, even though it was arguably one of his very best. People just didn't want to see a creepy Robin Williams, even if it's a story he clearly really wanted to tell. After that, it was as if they didn't want to see him at all.
The thing that pained me about seeing Robin Williams' career just peter off was the thought that there wasn't any sex scandal or any single movie that really "did him in" (the disastrous 2009 film Old Dogs notwithstanding). It wasn't even that he stopped getting work; iMDB lists him as having projects all the way through the end of 2014. The problem was just that people really didn't pay him that much attention anymore, whether it was the studios giving out roles or the audiences watching them. The guy made studio execs rich and made audiences laugh for years, and in the end they rewarded him with cold indifference while Adam Sandler's negative-I.Q., man-child movies made big money year after year. Let's see Adam Sandler pull off roles like the ones that Williams did in Awakenings, Dead Poets Society, or Good Will Hunting. Oh wait, that's right, he can't.
I won't launch into a treatise on depression, a topic I am not at all qualified to discuss, or list my "top ten Robin Williams performances" or anything like that.
If people had continued to watch Robin Williams' movies, would it have stopped him from killing himself? Probably not, but he would have arguably have had less to be depressed about near the end. Maybe he was just sad he couldn't make people laugh anymore, at least not with any new material.
I just wish, to be honest, that the Hollywood moneymaking machine hadn't killed Williams' career long before he killed himself, whether or not that was the actual cause of his depression.
I guess the closest thing that can approximate a "moral of the story" is that if audiences cherish their favorite actors, they should keep watching their movies in theaters rather than patronizing garbage like Adam Sandler's movies, or something like that.
Oh well, I did say I was struggling with what I wanted to say...
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