One Hour Photo

Movie: One Hour Photo (2002)
Watched with: nobody

This movie's kind of frustrating, because Robin Williams gives a really impressive performance, and it's really well shot (the scenes in the store have deep focus to make it look huge and neat while the parts of Sy's life out of the store are in shallow focus and cramped). You care about the characters and it's interesting the whole way through.

But the ending is a huge miscalculation.
What makes the character of Sy so compelling is that there's often a fine line between nice and creepy. Everyone crosses over that line somtimes, and Sy's tragedy is that he takes it too far.

At least, it should be.

At the end, we found out rather arbitrarily that all of Sy's problems are in fact caused by a childhood trauma that made him crazy.
This isn't implausible, neccessarily, but it does make it worse.
We should wonder if we could be Sy without realizing it, not just think, "There but the grace of God go I."