The archetype of the tragic clown is a seductive one. And the insidious idea that somehow, the cost of giving immeasurable pleasure to millions is unbearable personal agony was given a boost on August 11, 2014, when beloved comedian and global movie star Robin Williams committed suicide. Even those of us not necessarily among the front ranks of diehard Williams fans were shocked and saddened, caught up, it feels like, in the easy narrative of “tortured genius finally succumbing to his demons.” Praise be, then, for Marina Zenovich‘s formally unadventurous but satisfyingly celebratory documentary “Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind” which premieres on HBO soon. Without pulling its punches on the darker side of Williams’ personality, his addictions and his tragic end following a diagnosis with Parkinson’s that was actually a symptom, along with depression and paranoia, of a form of dementia, this affectionate portrait avoids the major pitfall of comparable docs like Asif Kapadia‘s “Amy” or Kevin Macdonald‘s recent “Whitney” in that it steadfastly refuses to make Williams’ death the defining aspect of his life.
Zenovich, who previously negotiated very different, but also highly sensitive, territory in “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” assembles a colorful array of archival footage, talking heads, TV and movie clips as well as copious excerpts from Williams’ own interviews, to give a roughly chronological biography of an incandescent talent. It mildly contradicts the promise of the somewhat grandiose title, but when the kind of psychological profile promised by the phrase ‘Come Into My Mind’ succeeds only rarely (the sublime, rigorous “Listen To Me, Marlon” being one of those few occasions), and more often ends up winnowing a subject’s true appeal down to some kind of simplistic cautionary tale, perhaps that’s a blessing.
So although it presents an overview of Williams’ childhood, his rise through the ranks on the stand-up circuit and his breakthrough with “Mork and Mindy,” we’re spared the sense of a filmmaker trying to “solve the mystery” of Williams’ personality. Instead, Zenovich’s approach, which may feel cursory to anyone hoping for a more salacious or revelatory format, honors its subject by not trying to explain Williams’ diamond-cut, extraordinary talent, but simply by describing it, from as many angles as the material allows. It makes the two-hour length fly by in a glittering, hi-octane, frequently hilarious, occasionally melancholic dazzle, of which his film career forms only a small part. Indeed, oftentimes, the clips Zenovich presents from his movies are brief, untitled and anachronistic, used more as a means to comment on his life stage or his frame of mind than as examples of career highlights.
From a cinephile point of view, it means the assessment of Williams’ importance as a screen actor is a little undernourished, but this is a gratifying choice, ultimately. Williams turned in some landmark cinematic performances, and the big hitters like “Aladdin,” “Mrs Doubtfire,” “Good Morning Vietnam,” “Good Will Hunting” and “Dead Poets Society” all show up, as do the likes of “Awakenings” and “One Hour Photo,” (director Mark Romanek is, surprisingly, one of the more forthcoming talking heads here). But he also made some average-to-terrible films, and thankfully Zenovich expends no energy trying to convince us that “Jack” or “Old Dogs” or “What Dreams May Come” or “Flubber” were, in fact, misunderstood masterpieces.
Instead, amid touchingly candid interviews with Williams’ wide, loving circle of acquaintance, Zenovich delivers much more material that is not the kind readily available on Netflix. There are the daft answerphone messages he left for Billy Crystal (“Hello, I’m calling from the Sssibilancccce Ssocciety!”) that are twofold touching, firstly because they illustrate that his inventive silliness wasn’t just something he switched on for a paying audience, and secondly because for whatever reason, Crystal saved them. There’s a clip of Williams and Steve Martin playing “Waiting for Godot” at Lincoln Center, and descriptions from co-star Pam Dawber of how every episode of “Mork and Mindy” became a 3-hour live spectacle for the studio audience. There are smatterings of his stand-up, with Williams lathered in sweat, leaping and gurning and talking a mile a minute, and scenes from his USO tour. Most uproariously, there’s a segment from the 2003 Critics Choice awards, when Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis tied for best actor… in a category of three, with Williams the unlucky spare. Nicholson invites Williams to give his acceptance speech, cuing an utterly inspired off-the-cuff routine about being the one guy who didn’t win: “I get it. This is basically the ‘Fuck you, Robin’ award…”
Williams’ problems — his cycle of addiction and drying out, his infidelities, the breakdown of his relationships, his long absences from his children’s lives — are here, but they’re never disproportionate, and are often related to us without rancor by the very people who have most cause to feel hurt by them: his first wife, his son, the friends he lost touch with. Again, unlike with “Amy,” for example, one gets the sense that Williams himself would have been moved by this portrait, not because it’s a hagiography, but because its priorities are the same as his were, and though many of the contributors get a little choked up at times, there’s no sense of any bitterness toward him.
So in some small way, this uncomplicated portrait of a complicated man reclaims his legacy, pulling it out from under the shadow of his death. It allows us to remember our favorite moments of his with straightforward, unalloyed pleasure once more. Leaving the theater, I thought a lot about Terry Gilliam‘s gorgeous “The Fisher King,” a film that, despite the director’s connection (she was an extra in the famous Grand Central Station waltzing scene) only appears fleetingly here. It contains all the good and bad humors of Williams’ performance style — wild, improvisational flights of fancy about the only three things you need in life (“Respect for all kinds of life, a nice bowel movement on a regular basis, and a navy blazer”) and a streak of sentimentality that could be maudlin but also touchingly sincere, like when his manic, homeless Parry, dressed in a stapled suit, sitting in a booth in a tacky Chinese restaurant, sings the bawdy Groucho Marx classic “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” in such a sweet, soft voice that it sounds like a love ballad. At the end of that film, Parry wakes up from a coma when his friend Jack (Jeff Bridges) completes a Quixotic quest of friendship on his behalf. It’s not too much of an overstatement to suggest that ‘Come Into My Mind’ is a similar kind of gift, a film that looks beyond the Robin Williams we lost, to give us back the Robin Williams we loved. [B+]