Most people who see Robin Williams loathe him. Sarah Gristwood asks if he’s really that bad
The jokes aren’t that funny. On Albert Einstein: “There’s even a theory that his first wife came up with the theory of relativity. Which would make it the theory of relatives.” On film flying: “The harness shorts are like something made by the Marquis de Suede.” The endless comic accents come too readily. His press audience laughs but it sounds a little dutiful today.
It might help you choke down this fact: Robin Williams is the most successful actor on the planet, thanks to seven films that have made more than $100-million at the United States box office alone. That’s what Empire magazine said last year. It’s probably eight by now, he’s so prolific. Maybe nine.
Williams has ingeniously created his own captive audience with the “family” movie. Parents trudge along reluctantly to make up the party. Indeed, it’s hard to find a Williams-free family film to take the children to on Saturday.
When he’s not playing a kid (Hook, The World According to Garp, the infamous Jack) he’s playing for kids (Aladdin, Jumanji and Popeye). “People often ask if I’d like to direct, but it would be hard for me to say to someone `That wasn’t very good’ and have them go `Well, what about Popeye?'”
In his more successful serious films he’s playing midwife to someone else’s inner child (Dead Poets Society, Awakenings). Williams has one in each category coming up in quick succession, not to mention a telling cameo in Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry.
In Flubber, an adaptation of The Absent- Minded Professor, he’s a lab rat, essentially another little boy writ large. Didn’t he publicly swear off man-children after Jack? “I don’t think Professor Brainard is a man- child – just slightly distant, not connected to the world as we know it,” he says a little defensively. In Gus van Sant’s Good Will Hunting he’s unusually restrained as the therapist helping a troubled boy.
“I’m not trying to work out something therapeutically in my films,” he insists. This although he has said playing Peter Pan was an exorcism. “I’m not trying to work out [goes into weirdo shrink accent] You’re a poster child for arrested development. Give it up. It’s coincidence, or whatever. For me it’s not to do with connecting with childhood, it’s connecting as a human being. It seems like every time you play a part that has a certain kind of naivety or a certain joy to it, it’s called child-like. Children do have joy, but some adults do too.”
Is joy the word for Williams, really? In the flesh, he comes over like the motor-mouthed DJ of Good Morning Vietnam. Younger than on screen. Just as hairy. A lot of his humour is faintly blue. Azure, anyway. Or maybe it’s just that he’ll leave no trick untried, so desperate is he to win you over. A lonely childhood, he said once, bred a later desire: “when you do perform, it’s like, `LOVE ME!'” And Williams’s interviews are first and foremost stand-up performances, though he will answer a straight question, if reluctantly.
The irony is that half the interviewers he’s ever had – and count me in – seem to loathe him instead. Loathe him on screen, anyway. There’s nothing like a puppy-dog eagerness to please for inviting a swift kick in the jaw: ask any schoolyard bully. He protests the pleasures of having two different strings to his bow – the ham and the heavyweight – but Williams seems aware that a moment of choice may come.
“I do films like Flubber for the children. I have children and I want something for them to see. I have no illusions about the critics going `We love it’ – fat chance, buddy. The only audience reaction that would worry me is if the children leave the cinema going: `There is no depth.'” He does a child voice, and this time it is funny.
“A film like Deconstructing Harry, which is really black comedy, I did because I just wanted to be in the same room as Woody Allen.” But he plays a man, an actor, whose physical outlines become blurry. What better metaphor for problems of identity? “I do a film like Good Will Hunting because the story really works. I read the script and thought, you’d be insane to pass this up. It’s part of what I hope to do eventually.” When he grows up, you can’t help thinking.
“I trained to be an actor. I went to Juilliard. [John] Houseman went: `Mr Williams, you’re damaged but interesting.'” A portentous thespian accent and a Rodin’s Thinker pose. He insists that his childhood (only child, with half-brothers he didn’t know about until later, travelling businessman father, busy Christian Scientist mother) was solitary but not unhappy. But something there once led him into a moderate cocaine habit that seems incongruous today. He was cleaned up, he says, by the impending birth of his first child – and by the death of friend John Belushi.
“It’s a roulette wheel,” says Williams. “You can only look at a script and say, is it something I should be doing, and that only I can do? The truth is with Flubber there were about 25 guys who could play that part. Honest. It’s an effects movie.
“Fame has come and gone maybe 15 times. It’s surreal, like a Mardi Gras float, and I’m not going to say it isn’t fun. But the other part is having a life … and having a life as an adult. I didn’t mean to keep coming back to the child thing.
“But I’m a father, I’m 46 years old, I have three kids, and I love them madly. Making movies for them, I also have to try and make movies for myself, to keep my mind alive. I have to try and be an adult.” Perhaps Robin Williams isn’t that bad, really.
Flubber opens on circuit on June 19