Robin Williams did a lot of great work. But if you do enough stuff, you’ll eventually crank out a stinker. Usually you have a chance to bounce back from that. Sadly, it looks like critics are not liking the last live action film that Robin Williams did.
The film is called Boulevard. In it, Robin Williams plays a 60-year-old bank officer that New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden says “may be the loneliest man Mr. Williams ever played.”
The point of the film is supposed to be the life of quiet desperation that Williams’ character, Nolan Mack, lives. Sadly, many reviewers say this film doesn’t go much further than chronicling how miserable Mack is. Some say it is the writing itself, but others say the fault may lie in the director not knowing how to tell Robin Williams what he sometimes needs to hear.
Reviewer Mike D’Angelo says, “Without a strong director to rein him in, however—a Peter Weir or a Gus Van Sant or a Christopher Nolan—he had a tendency to think he was projecting ‘deep’ when he was actually turning in something uncomfortably close to ‘moist.’”
Robin Williams on the set of his final film: "He was constantly making people laugh" http://t.co/i5UkHTEyH1 pic.twitter.com/N77QjRpXq8
— Newsweek (@Newsweek) July 10, 2015
Nolan Mack is secretly gay. He has repressed this all his life, and is dutifully married to a woman who is his best friend in the world. They sleep in separate bedrooms. On evening, Mack picks up a male prostitute. He does not want sex, only companionship. He becomes infatuated with this troubled young man, and his life suffers for it. His own father will not accept him for who he is.
While the story sounds like something that is timely, reviewers say the film does not go anywhere with this other than to observe the trouble.
New York Post reviewer Kyle Smith says that the trouble is not Williams, it’s the script.
“Thanks to Williams’ deeply human performance, we feel for Nolan,” Smith says, “but the predictability of his story reduces him to a stock figure.”
Robin Williams has one more film in the chamber yet to be released. It is an animated feature called Absolutely Anything, in which Williams voices a dog. Perhaps we will hear more praise for a genre that Williams always seemed to excel in.
The many faces of the great Robin Williams. pic.twitter.com/XCYoZPltme
— Historical Pics (@HistoricalPics) July 14, 2015