Robin Williams (1951-2014)

Robin Williams starred in the 2010 film World's Greatest Dad, written and directed by his longtime colleague and friend Bobcat Goldthwait, about a schoolteacher of advancing age whom life has pretty securely passed by, who somehow hasn't abandoned his hopes but whose one inescapable focus is a much-loved son who is his bleakest nightmare, beyond his reach or help.

by Ken

What to say about Robin Williams? The obvious thing, I suppose, is the common wisdom that comedy all too often comes out of hurt and pain, and what we know of the circumstances of his death yesterday at 63 suggests a degree of desolation -- at the hands of the demons we're now hearing so much about, alcohol and cocaine and depression -- I had no inkling of. It's painful just trying to imagine that kind of pain.

I could have written something last night -- at least chronologically I could have. I still had maybe an hour and a half when I finished my intended post for last night and encountered the news about Robin Williams. The only thing was, I had no idea what to say, and a day later I'm not sure I have much more of an idea. But since he was without question one of the greatest performers I've ever seen perform, I feel that I have to try to say something.

Among the day's media bombardments I saw or heard something about a tribute to Robin W (it seems a little personal for me just to start calling him "Robin") from Steve Martin, and that sounded interesting. Steve M has enough of a kind of genius that is eerily close to Robin W's kind that he would probably understand better than most anyone I can think of. No, I'm not going to try to define or describe it. If you know their work, it's too obvious to call for definition or description, and if you don't, well, it's beyond my powers of either.

It turns out that the reference was likely to this tweet:



I'm reminded that Mike Nichols had the inspiration to cast Steve M and Robin W as twin lost souls Vladimir and Estragon in his 1988 staging of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The formidable cast was filled out with F. Murray Abraham as Pozzo and Bill Irwin as Lucky, which only increases my regret at not having seen the production. About all I can say is that I'm not in any of the upper tiers of Godot fandom.

All of the Robin W remembrances speak, for obvious and excellent reason, of his energy and unpredictability as a performer. Of course there have been lots of performers with equally abundant energy who could be utterly unberable, and as for the unpredictability, it often comes out sounding as much like an indictment as a tribute, the suggestion (if not outight statement) being that the subject was awfully difficult to work with, although in the course of his incredibly crowded career he worked with an awful lot of people, and vice versa.

All through that jam-packed career, Robin W was so, well, present that it wasn't always easy to step back and puzzle out what was so special about him. I found myself doing it periodically, and was never quite able to square my unshakable conviction that he was in the small group of the most brilliant performers I've ever seen with the reality that I couldn't easily point to the work of his which would back up such a judgment, going back to the very beginning -- I didn't much enjoy or watch Mork and Mindy.

I guess if pressed I could say that I liked Mrs. Doubtfire, but I've also never had an impulse to watch it again, and even it left me with kind of a creepy feeling, something creepy and desperate. Where Robin W seemed to really blaze was on occasions as a talk-show guest where he had something exploding inside him and the host just let him go with it. And no, I don't remember the specifics of any of those appearances. I just remember the sustained exhilaration of the ride.

By way of proof of artistic seriousness the general run of Robin W rememberers have been trotting out Dead Poets Society and Good Will Hunting, which puts me at a disadvantage, since they both struck me as the kind of syrupy feel-good Hollywood fake-outsider sludge that I find it hard to imagine him having much sympathy with.

As it happens, the most recent Robin W performance I've seen, also a non-comic one, was as woebegone schoolteacher Lance Clayton, the title character of World's Greatest Dad (2010), written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, which was shown as part of an early June evening with Bobcat G at the Museum of the Moving Image which also featured his latest film, Willow Creek. It wasn't hard to guess that an offbeat, outsider sensibility had made Bobcat G and Robin W soulmates of a sort, and obvious collaborators on World's Greatest Dad. In a film that's a pretty grim comedy, Robin W gives a performance that has a measure of sweetness and a heavy burden of devastation. I was surprised and pleased to find the clip above on YouTube. I might have gone so far as to say that it's a haunting performance, but I don't want to dwell just now on its hauntingness, for reasons that may be clear from the clip.

To go back to Steve Martin's words, we have:

Mensch. Great talent. Genuine soul.

POSTSCRIPT: "7 SOCIAL ISSUES ROBIN
WILLIAMS BROUGHT TO THE SCREEN"

ThinkProgress's "Progress Report" has a Robin Williams remembrance that notes:

Williams was able to bring characters of all kinds to life not just for a few hours on the screen; he was able to make them stay permanently in his audience’s memory. Through these characters, Williams was able to elevate social issues in movies in a way that few actors can. To honor the man, Think Progress assembled a list of seven such issues Williams touched in his films.

If you're wondering what the seven issues are:

1. Homelessness and mental health in The Fisher King
2. Gay and gender identity in The Birdcage
3. Press freedom in Good Morning Vietnam
4. Addiction in The Crazy Ones
5. Domestic abuse in Good Will Hunting
6. Deforestation in FernGully
7. Single parenting in Mrs. Doubtfire

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