Robin Williams - not the usual celebrity

Many screen comedians, and virtually all of the best ones, have mixed humor with sadness. But only Robin Williams committed to the screen such a vast range of exuberant, life-loving zaniness and bone-deep tragedy, sometimes within the same film.

These extremes, existing side by side in most of his best work, never could have been harmonized in performance if they did not dwell within the man himself. He had both within him, the comic and the tragic, and to contemplate that now, in light of his death, is to feel a painful sympathy, as well as frustration. It's as if the wrong side of his nature had somehow gained the upper hand - and stolen him from us, and from himself.

No, this is not the usual celebrity death, because Robin Williams, who died Monday at age 63 of an apparent suicide, was not the usual celebrity. He was so naked as a performer, so open, so vulnerable, so willing to be seen, that everyone who saw him felt that they knew him. Actually many people in the Bay Area did know him, and his reputation was exemplary. Even in the world of comedy, with all its rivalries and caustic personalities, Williams never inspired a hostile word.

Gentle with all

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I met him only once, but under good circumstances - not an artificial interview situation, but backstage at a Comedy Day show at Golden Gate Park in 1987. We just happened to be sitting in the same group, outside on a beautiful summer afternoon. By this time, Williams was already established as one of the premier standup comedians of the era, and his film career was exploding. Yet there was nothing weird about him that day, nothing forced, and there was no strained effort to be a regular guy. He was gentle with everyone, almost subdued, as if aware of the capacity of his celebrity to do damage. All in all, he seemed like a warm and considerate person.

1987 was the year of "Good Morning, Vietnam," in which Williams played an irreverent disc jockey in Vietnam. He has a remarkable scene in that film, in which he is standing up in a Jeep, clowning around for the soldiers who are driving by in trucks, heading for the frontlines. Director Barry Levinson keeps the camera on Williams, as he plays to the crowd, his face simultaneously registering his awareness that some of these guys won't be coming back.

Films to rediscover

Williams was an actor and a comedian, not a comedian who became an actor. He studied at Juilliard. His ambition was to act, and he succeeded in the most important way, making something immortal of himself. For some reason, I keep returning to a moment from "Hook" (1991). It was one of Steven Spielberg's least successful films, but Williams has a lovely moment in it as the grown-up Peter Pan. He meets his old friends from Neverland, who don't recognize him until they study his middle-aged face and find, under the layers of three decades, Peter's confident smile.

There were many such moments in Williams work, indelible and full of feeling - and other moments and movies that were not as successful. His melancholy aura, which became more pronounced over time, sometimes brought depth to his performances, sometimes undermined his comedy, and sometimes veered straight into maudlin ("House of D"). But at least no one could ever accuse Williams of holding back.

His best films will last, though a handful need to be rediscovered, or discovered in the first place. Just about anyone who's interested already knows about Williams' Oscar-winning dramatic performance in "Good Will Hunting," his serio-comic work in "Dead Poet's Society," and his uproarious farcical turn in "Mrs. Doubtfire," his funniest comedy. But few seek him out as the defector in "Moscow On the Hudson," one of his best films, and fewer still have ever seen him in "What Dreams May Come" (1998), a strange film about a newly dead man searching for his wife in the afterlife.

Existential drama

Though he continued to make comedies in recent years, including the not-bad "Old Dogs" and the not-awful "The Big Wedding," Williams, by this time, had cornered the market on a certain variety of existential drama - one of the finest of these being "The Final Cut" from 2004. Few have seen it. It takes place in a futuristic world in which people's entire lives are recorded as seen from behind their eyes - and then edited down to two hours to be shown at their memorial services.

Williams played an expert cutter, capable of finding narrative sense and an illusion of redemption in the most coarse and selfish of lives, but as Williams plays him, his career of seeing the awful truth has made him a sad, solitary man. Williams makes us believe that he knows and feels the horribleness of everything and everyone, but he can never express it - except to us, through his eyes.

Williams' body of work will last, though I suspect he may someday be known more as a dramatic actor than as a comedian.

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