Williams' Best films:
World's Greatest Dad
Moscow on the Hudson
Picture
Robin Williams was a brilliant standup comedian, a master of improvisation, and an exceptional mimic. He became very famous for his brilliant improvisations-- precisely the reason why it became impossible for him to make a truly great film. His talent was not the talent that is useful to a director or writer when creating a film. He made films because Hollywood makes films with celebrities, not actors.
As an actor, I always thought he was less than average, confusing restraint and modulation for character. Hollywood knew what to do with him-- in the perverse way Hollywood deals with all original talents: take out all the guts, add some heart-warming drek, and make the audience feel sophisticated. Make him a saintly, wise, lovable psychiatrist, only barely more believable than Liv Tyler in "Reign Over Me", who devotes all of his waking hours to a single disturbed math whiz and provides miraculous cures that no one in the real world has ever experienced. Dress him as a woman and set his fake breasts on fire in the preposterous and schmaltzy "Mrs. Doubtfire": a sure Hollywood winner because our hero is funny and wicked and naughty AND-- he loves his family! This was a conceit so fantastical that it took hours and hours of the best make-up crew in Hollywood to make it even remotely not ridiculous. Set him up against cardboard cutout stereo-typed villains -- in most of his films, but most egregiously in "Patch Adams"-- so the audience feels wonderful about being on the side of people they can't stand in real life. His roles were emasculated, neutered, homogenized, cleaned up and packaged for mass audiences.
But I would have liked to see him live as Estragon in "Waiting for Godot" (with Steve Martin as Vladimir). But even there, at least one reviewer was ambivalent about Williams' "stage antics". (Steve Martin, in the same production, was also dissed by the reviewer, for blending too far into the background, a phenomenon I have noted, in which great comic talents believe that by not being antic they are actually "acting" and creating a character.
Amid all the drivel that always rises to the top upon the death of a popular entertainer, the most ridiculous is that, besides being a great comic, he was also a great actor: he was not. I think people were so impressed by the contrast between his drawn-in, restrained, sedated performances an actor, especially in "One Hour Photo", that they confused the absence of character expression with the presence of talent.
Williams' talents were far more suited to secondary characters, dissolute friends, unfaithful husbands, writers and artists, drunks, and bums. So "The Fisher King" was an ideal platform for him-- except, they couldn't stand to have him play a real homeless psycho, so they eliminated all the real-life characteristics of homeless people-- the things that make them a real problem to deal with-- and sweetened him up and cleaned him up so he was adorable and safe, and thereby obviated the entire point of the movie. The only example of Hollywood doing this worse is "Reign Over Me"-- which, it must be admitted, was way more repulsive.
Of all of them-- and some were very, very awful-- "The Dead Poets Society" pissed me off the most because it was a calculated pitch to audiences who think they have better taste than most people because they will go to a movie with the word "poet" in the title and features scattered readings of one or two lines from poets who are famous for being poets (but nobody too obscure, please, or my friends won't be as impressed), but who could never actually stand listening to any poem more complex than a limerick.
"Dead Poets Society" was never really about poetry or life at all. It was about admiring yourself for seeing a movie in which a charismatic actor does everything except poetry. He has the pipe and the patches on the sweater and the high brow manners, but if "Dead Poets Society" showed you, for even an instant, the real stuff of poetry, mass audiences would be offended and frightened and would hurry back to their TV sets. The boys themselves don't live poetry: they admire it like dilettantes, adopting the symbols and manners but none of the substance of a poetic conscious: they completely forget that great poetry is always about something and only the worst, dullest, least interesting poetry is about poetry.
The sad, sad truth is that Robin Williams did not factor in a single movie that mattered.