But as complicated as all such cases are to explain, his might be even more so. That might seem counter-intuitive, as if a brilliant person's suicide is the thing any decent deep exploration of his being has to be able to account for. That's one of the things that made parts of his life so difficult.įurthermore - and critically - examining his thinking does not necessarily mean endeavoring to explain his suicide. It's very easy for that to devolve in creative portraits into "depression is what makes creative people brilliant" or "poets need their addictions," but that's not what anyone here is saying. The pain and the brilliance, just like the goofing around and the dramatic work in One Hour Photo, circled each other like a little binary star. Parts of it are funny, parts of it are sad and funny (like watching him crack up Philip Seymour Hoffman on the set of Patch Adams), and parts of it are just sad. The film is, just as the title suggests, an effort to document not just what Williams' talents were and what his challenges were, but the particular operation of his mind, linking some of his talents with some of his struggles without romanticizing his addiction or any of his other troubles. The HBO documentary, called Come Inside My Mind, directed by Marina Zenovich, wisely takes a less expansive and more specific approach than a chapter-by-chapter biography. He is a thread woven through the comedy and film culture of the '80s through the aughts, and yet he always seemed a bit inaccessible. He was on Johnny Carson's last real show - the one with Bette Midler, the second-to-last one, before the farewell. He was with John Belushi on the night Belushi died. Williams has an almost Forrest-Gump-ish relationship with entertainment in both bright and dark ways: He was dear friends with Christopher Reeve before Reeve was in Superman. He was always a man of many appearances here and there, and then, startlingly, he died from suicide in 2014. The man had a great, percussive laugh a ha-ha-ha you hear most clearly in the film when his mother pulls a rubber band out of her nose.Ī pure biography of Robin Williams might well not tell us anything we didn't already know: He was an explosively brilliant stand-up comedian, then a sitcom actor, then a movie actor, then an Oscar winner. That cackle, too, is so much a part of him.
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