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Robin Williams, an Improvisational Genius
Improvisational Genius, Forever Present in the Moment
Some years ago, at a party at the Cannes Film Festival, I was leaning against a rail watching
a fireworks display when I heard a familiar voice behind me. Or rather, at least a dozen
voices, punctuating the offshore explosions with jokes, non sequiturs and off-the-wall
pop-cultural, *** and political references.
There was no need to turn around: The voices were not talking directly to me and they could
not have belonged to anyone other than Robin Williams, who was extemporizing a monologue
at least as pyrotechnically amazing as what was unfolding against the Mediterranean sky.
I'm unable to recall the details now, but you can probably imagine the rapid-fire succession
of accents and pitches - macho basso, squeaky girlie, French, Spanish, African-American,
human, animal and alien - entangling with curlicues of self-conscious commentary about
the sheer ridiculousness of anyone trying to narrate explosions of colored gunpowder
in real time.
Very few people would try to upstage fireworks, and probably only Robin Williams could have
succeeded. I doubt anyone asked him for his play-by-play, an impromptu performance for
a small, captive group, and I can't say if it arose from inspiration or compulsion. Maybe
there's not really a difference. Whether or not anyone expected him to be, and maybe whether
or not he entirely wanted to be, he was on.
Part of the shock of his death Monday came from the fact that he had been on - ubiquitous,
self-reinventing, insistently present - for so long. On Twitter, mourners dated themselves
with memories of the first time they had noticed him. For some it was the movie "Aladdin."
For others "Dead Poets Society" or "Mrs. Doubtfire." I go back even further, to the "Mork and Mindy"
television show and an album called "Reality - What a Concept" that blew my eighth-grade
mind.
Back then, it was clear that Williams was one of the most explosively, exhaustingly,
prodigiously verbal comedians who ever lived. The only thing faster than his mouth was his
mind, which was capable of breathtaking leaps of free-associative absurdity.
Janet Maslin, reviewing his standup act in 1979, cataloged a tumble of riffs that ranged
from an impression of Jacques Cousteau to "an evangelist at the Disco Temple of Comedy,"
to Truman Capote Jr. at "the Kindergarten of the Stars" (whatever that was). "He acts
out the Reader's Digest condensed version of 'Roots,'" Maslin wrote, "which lasts 15
seconds in its entirety. He improvises a Shakespearean-sounding epic about the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster,
playing all the parts himself, including Einstein's ghost." (That, or something like it, was a
role he would reprise more than 20 years later in Steven Spielberg's "A.I.")
Onstage, Williams' speed allowed him to test audience responses and to edit and change
direction on the fly. He simultaneously explained and acted out this process in "Come Inside
My Mind," a 2 1/2-minute tour de force of manic meta - "I'm doing great! I'm improvising
like crazy! No you're not, you fool! You're just doing pee-pee-ca-ca, no substance!"
But if Williams was often self-aware, commenting on what he was doing as he was doing it, he
was rarely arch or insincere. He could, as an actor, succumb to treacliness sometimes
- maybe more than sometimes - but his essential persona as an entertainer combined neediness
and generosity, intelligence and kindness, in ways that were charming and often unexpectedly
moving as well.
In his periodic post-"Mork and Mindy" television appearances (on "The Larry Sanders Show" and
more recently on "Louie"), he often played sly, sad or surprising versions of himself,
the Robin Williams some of us had known and loved since childhood, which means an entertainer
we sometimes took for granted or allowed ourselves to tire of. Many of his memorable big-screen
performances were variations on that persona - madcap, motor-mouthed, shape-shifting jokers
like the genie in "Aladdin," the anti-authoritarian DJ in "Good Morning Vietnam," Parry in "The
Fisher King" and even the redoubtable Mrs. Doubfire herself.
That was a role within a role, of course, and Williams' best serious movie characters
- or maybe we should say the non-silly ones, since an element of playfulness was always
there - had a similar doubleness. Watching him acting in earnest, you could not help
but be aware of the exuberance, the mischief, that was being held in check, and you couldn't
help but wonder when, how or if it would burst out. That you knew what he was capable of
made his feats of self-control all the more exciting. You sometimes felt that he was aware
of this and that he enjoyed the sheer improbability of appearing as the straight man, the heavy,
the voice of reason.
He was very good at playing it cool or quiet or restrained as other actors in his movies
- Nathan Lane in "The Birdcage," Robert DeNiro in "Awakenings," Matt Damon in "Good Will
Hunting" - brought the heat, the noise or the wildness. He was an excellent and disciplined
character actor, even as he was also an irrepressible, indelible character, a voice - or voices - that
many of us have been hearing for as long as we can remember.