Robin Williams: Fears of a Clown
Mr. and Mrs. Robin Williams are slow dancing. The time: a winter afternoon. The place: a photographer’s studio in the Chelsea section of New York. The music: high-decibel funk. Everybody else in the studio is abuzz — adjusting lights, fussing with props, running back and forth from the kitchen with sushi. Still, Williams and his wife, Marsha, keep coming together in these quick, sweet tableaux. It’s strange to see the thirty-nine-year-old actor and comedian with his guard down — he has been famous for twelve years and people are still trying to figure out whether he’s a bird or a plane.
“When I met Robin in the Seventies, he was always on,” says Penny Marshall, who directed Williams’s new film Awakenings. “It was always, ‘Hey, big mama. Hey, baby.’ He was very funny, but it was hard for him to just say, ‘Hello, how are you?’ Now he does that very well.”
These days, meeting Robin Williams is positively ordinary — it is a nonevent. He does not somersault into the room. He does not play with your hair. He does not do John Wayne as Macbeth or Jack Nicholson as Hamlet. He does not pretend he’s a dog smoking pot, a cat on Valium or a cow on acid. Instead, he is suddenly there, shaking your hand and asking you about yourself. He seems almost timid. He’s doing okay. How are you?
Williams still speaks in tongues, but nowadays you always know who you’re talking to. Over the course of the weekend, he’ll have some reverent things to say about Dr. Oliver Sacks, upon whom Williams’s timorous, inward character in Awakenings is loosely based. He’ll have some angry things to say about the fact that not long ago he was hanged in effigy as stand-up comedy’s master thief. He’ll have some bitter things to say about certain press accounts that have depicted Marsha, who is his second wife, as a nanny-on-wheels who busted up his first marriage. And, of course, he’ll goof around some. He’ll do Stallone as a hooker. He’ll do Prince as Peter Pan.
Just now, though, Williams has said his hellos, and he and Marsha are dancing close. Funk is shaking the room, but the Williamses don’t hear it.
“It’s been a sequence,” Williams says at his hotel later. “With Good Morning, Vietnam, people said, ‘Ah, at last he’s found a way to be funny and still be a little restrained.’ With Dead Poets Society, they went, ‘Oh, this is interesting — he’s even more restrained.’ And with Awakenings, it’ll be ‘Look! He’s medicated! He’s gone even further. What’s he playing next? He’s playing a door. And after that? A black hole.’ “
“I really like being on. It makes it easier. ‘Cause being off would be pretty fucking boring.”
In Awakenings, which is adapted from Oliver Sacks’s book of the same name, Williams plays the neurologist Dr. Malcolm Sayer. At the outset of the film, Sayer arrives at a chronic-care hospital in the Bronx. He finds a ward of patients who once suffered from encephalitis and who for decades have been frozen in their wheelchairs. Despite the naysaying of his fellow doctors, who regard the patients as effectively brain dead, Sayer administers a controversial drug named L-dopa and the ward springs dramatically, but briefly, to life.
There are some frustrating things about Awakenings — chiefly that it’s a devastating story dressed up in a feel-good movie’s clothes. Still, at the core of the film there are two exceptional performances: Robert De Niro’s as Leonard Lowe, the first patient to “awaken,” and Williams’s. “Restrained” as it is, the part of Sayer is perfect for Williams because the character’s main components are sadness and wonder. These same components can be found in much of his best film work (Dead Poets Society, Moscow on the Hudson, The World According to Garp). They can be found beneath the outward trappings of his stand-up comedy — the neo-Hawaiian shirts, the goofy ballet moves, the who’s-on-first routines done solo. And they can be found, in great supply, in Williams himself.
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