It only takes a quick scan of Robin Williams’ filmography to see how unusual his movie career really was. He cashed in his Mork-fame with Robert Altman’s fantastically weird “Popeye” and a winning lead role in a literary fantasia, “The World According to Garp.”
Every time he scored huge with pure comedy, a la “Mrs. Doubtfire,” he quickly turned to melancholy parts that suggested an urge to save the world. And the last 15 years are riddled with creepy, depressed little indies in which he played throttled men who were sometimes quietly desperate, sometimes malevolent: “One Hour Photo,” “The Final Cut,” “The Night Listener,” and “World’s Greatest Dad.”
Never widely distributed, these are strange portraits that emphasized what was tightly-wrapped and uneasy about Williams, something that was always there, even in his big successes (look at the way he and his “Awakenings” co-star Robert De Niro have the same clenched, uptight body language when they move across the screen).
“Boulevard,” completed the year before Williams’ suicide, is from that dark portfolio. He plays Nolan, a 60-year-old bank drone; when his boss tells him he’d be a great candidate for a managerial opening at a suburban branch, it sounds like a death knell.
Nolan and wife Joy (Kathy Baker, right-on as always), a defeated former academic, sleep in separate rooms. The table is therefore set for Nolan to pick up a street hustler, Leo (Roberto Aguire, who should be going places), and let himself be foolishly dragged into Leo’s unsavory existence.
Except, the film quietly suggests, this is not so foolish, because every “mistake” that Nolan makes is another step in the direction of admitting who and what he actually is.
The director, Dito Montiel, is at least in more restrained form here than in his overwrought “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.” Douglas Soesbe’s script provides creaky expositional devices, including Nolan’s implausible conversations with a professor-friend (Bob Odenkirk) and deathbed chats with his mute father in a hospital ward.
In one of those monologues, Nolan asserts that he’s angry about all the closeted years, and it’s one of the rare moments in which the film acknowledges something stronger than a fable about a butterfly emerging from its cocoon.
It’s one of Robin Williams’ best moments, and he remains a presence of grace in a film that is otherwise not up to his very particular talents — but you could say that about the majority of his movie projects, unfortunately.
“Boulevard” (two stars)
Robin Williams takes one of his odd dramatic roles, as a throttled, closeted gay man who begins acting recklessly. The movie isn’t bringing too many new ideas to the theme of a secretive man craving change, but Williams (in one of his last performances) creates some moments of grace out of it.
Rating: R, for violence, subject matter
Showing: SIFF Uptown theater
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