Picture Perfect in a Suburban Hell

This is middle-America as One Hour Photo director Mark Romanek sees it: a sprawling wasteland of green lawns and tidy streets, where planned-communities and strip-malled homogenization speak not only of prosperity, but also of quiet desperation. This is Wal-Mart culture at its most efficient, channeling our frenzied rat-race scamperings into a soothing, categorized existence of bright lights and straight aisles. We bring our infections, our insecurities and our secrets to these 24-hour temples, wallow in anonymity, then purchase a quick fix and a smile. If something isn't for sale, you probably didn't need it in the first place.

The alarming new film One Hour Photo, which has just now crept its way into the Triangle after weeks of screenings in New York and L.A., probes at the underbelly of suburban consumer culture in a disturbing juxtaposition of obscurity and intimacy. Robin Williams is Sy Parrish, a multi-decade veteran of the photofinishing business and permanent fixture at the local Sav-Mart. Sy is a self-professed "nobody," whose zippered nylon windbreakers and beige orthopedic shoes suggest a wholly forgettable existence.

His day-to-day is ruled by rigid routine and a plethora of managerial demigods, and his personal life by a spiraling obsession with the photographs he develops of a shutter-happy young couple. Their birthdays, holidays and celebrations are the overly bright, artificially enhanced existence we all try to sell ourselves. Blinded by this vision, mired in a bland reality, Sy occupies a no-man's-land of imagination gone awry.

Unlike most of the trash heaped upon us at the end of the summer, One Hour Photo is not clearance-rack fare. The film is genuinely creepy--it combines the palm-sweating anticipation of Silence of the Lambs with the Paradise Lost hopelessness of American Beauty into an engaging plot with an actual message. In a cinematic season of half-hearted corporate complacency, brow-slapping dialogue and easy symbolism for the masses, One Hour Photo is certainly the most intelligent and worthwhile choice on the market.

One Hour Photo is playing at the Carolina Theatre this week at 7:15 and 9:15 p.m. with weekend matinees at 2:15 and 4:15 p.m. The film is also playing at the Varsity in Chapel Hill at 7:10 and 9:20 p.m., with weekend matinees at 2:10 and 4:20 p.m.