![]() It was positioned as a kiddie adventure, but what we got was something else: an intensely personal psychological session about responsibility and fatherhood. Steven Spielberg’s Peter Pan sequel, in which Williams plays a Pan who has grown up and become a neglectful yuppie named Peter Banning, has gotten a lot of grief over the years. It’s a short but memorable performance: Divorced from the needs of his more family-friendly starring roles, Williams lets loose with a deranged riff on the mind-body divide.ĭon’t even start. Williams plays the King of the Moon, in a wild part that has his disembodied head talking about his high-minded powers of creation before realizing that the rest of his body is off elsewhere trying to do the Queen of the Moon. I think, therefore you is.” Williams’s generosity as an actor and person can be seen in the fact that he was willing, at the height of his fame, to do this cameo appearance in Terry Gilliam’s expensive, magical epic. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) There is nothing so despairing - or potentially so lethal - as a clown who has given up hope of making us laugh but wants to have an impact on us anyway.ġ1. The sour little curl of Williams’s mouth reminds me of Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer - all the paranoid alertness of a stand-up comic with none of the genial pandering. I can’t do any better: “The key is what doesn’t do: Those rubber features remain rigid, that madcap energy harnessed. “Men … smeeear.”ĭavid Edelstein quoted his review of this film in his touching remembrance of Williams yesterday. But watch the performances, particularly Williams’s, closely: This movie is as much about the affectations of straightness and the flamboyance of macho, about the fact that the concept of a “real man” is just as much a performance as anything else. You think at first that it’s going to be a (potentially offensive) movie that overdoes the flamboyance, that’s all about mocking the broad affectations of gayness. Mike Nichols and Elaine May’s adaptation of La Cage aux Folles, about a gay nightclub owner (Williams) and his partner (Nathan Lane) who have to pretend to be straight when his son becomes engaged to the daughter of a conservative politician, is a surprisingly sly movie. But watch it again, and you’ll see sadness and levity intertwined in a way that informed so much of his career. As the actor became more and more of a comic persona, his observant, somewhat passive performance in this film seemed like more and more of an anomaly. At least some of that credit goes to Williams, who as the lead brings just the right amount of quizzical innocence to the part. ![]() It’s kind of a miracle that John Irving’s serio-comic novel about the endless series of misfortunes (and occasional joys) that befall one man somehow managed to make it to the screen without turning into a bleak recitation of tragedy. ![]() But it’s also full of moments of stunning sadness and beauty, and if you manage to get on its wavelength, you’ll find that Williams is quite heartbreaking in it. (That’s not even the half of it: He needs help from the spirits of his dead kids to do so.) The film was tampered with in post, and it shows. But this is a haunting, and haunted, film: It’s about a man who finds himself in Heaven and then tries to save his beloved wife from Hell after he finds out she committed suicide. That Williams had to learn it in a crash course right before filming speaks to his craft and dedication.Ī profoundly earnest and troubled film that’s rather reviled by many, Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come was seen at the time as another example of Williams doing absurdly sentimental fare that didn’t properly utilize his talents and further dulled his edge. (And, as is so often the case with Williams, you want him to hug you back.) Native speakers will to this day swear by his accent in the scenes he has to speak Russian - apparently, it’s one of the best examples of a non-Russian actor speaking the language. And he’s so touching here, you just want to give him a hug. Rather, he’s playing a stranger in a strange land, letting the absurdity around him do the comic heavy lifting. In the late Paul Mazursky’s lovely comedy about a Soviet saxophonist who defects to New York, Williams isn’t in full wildman mode.
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