Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind (2018): Mayday! Mayday! Laugh Until You Cry

This is the second of two reviews discussing a couple of very interesting documentaries. My last post looked at the brilliant Three Identical Strangers, released about three weeks ago and still showing at select theaters. That film portrays an almost unbelievable story of triplets, separated at birth, who inadvertently discover one another nineteen years later, and using creative storytelling techniques, recreates the emotionally heady days of their reunion and the up and down journey that followed. The new biopic about comic genius Robin Williams, subtitled, Come Inside My Mind, needs no clever techniques to relate its story. Williams himself supplied more than enough imagination, originality and creative artistry on his own, and director Marina Zenovich had a surfeit of aural and visual archival material available to her - as well her own interviews with Williams’ family members, friends and collaborators - with which to tell his story.

So, Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind is a pretty straightforward documentary; but man, is it loaded with some great material! Much of this is hilarious, other parts are revealing, and quite a bit has never been seen publicly before.  The film follows Robin from his childhood – raised primarily by his mother, who was something of a card herself - and his youthful training at Julliard, to his brilliant early days as a stand-up in San Francisco, through his burst into stardom as the odd, hysterically funny space alien on Mork and Mindy (1978 – 1982), his three marriages, his close friendships with Billy Crystal and others, and his leap into movie stardom with films like Moscow On The Hudson (1984), Good Morning Vietnam (1987), Dead Poets Society (1989) , Good Will Hunting (1997) and especially Aladdin (1992) and Mrs Doubtfire (1993). In addition to the archival stuff, commentary is provided by fellow comics like Crystal, Eric Idle, Elayne Boosler, and David Letterman; family members, including Robin’s son, Zak and first wife, Valerie Velardi; Steve Martin (who costarred with Robin in a Broadway production of Waiting For Godot), Pam Dawber (co-star of Mork and Mindy), and others.  Director Zenovich puts all of this material together seamlessly and beautifully.

Many of us already feel like we knew and loved Robin, and the public fondness for the actor/comedian has made the new film something of a sensation. More than a million people watched the movie on it’s very first day streaming on HBO. My sense is that, Mork and Mindy aside, the majority of Robin’s fans know him primarily from his films. Although these folks come from all walks of life, somehow the actor was able to connect with them on a deep, human level. Indeed, there have apparently been some complaints that the film doesn’t spend enough of its nearly two hour run time with the movies. According to director Zenovich, this was not by design exactly. “We went with what worked,” she said. “At a certain point, we had different movie clips in there, but some of them just weren’t right. The stand-up spoke to me. Although I appreciate him as an actor, stand-up with something he could always go back to and it was there for him.”  

To be clear, there are lots of clips from Robin’s movies; but for the most part, they are not very lengthy – although there is a nice extended scene from Good Will Hunting, and three outtakes from Mrs. Doubtfire - of a scene in which Robin (as the title character) explains how poor Mr. Doubtfire met his demise. Each take tells a different story, each is funny.

Still, from my perspective, Zenovich clearly took the right approach. As I thought about Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind and how best to describe Robin, I spent a few moments thinking up adjectives; within just a couple of minutes, I came up with about twenty-five, like manic, fearless, unfiltered, smart, whimsical, and brilliant. None of these descriptors called up the man as an actor (although some would be apt). He certainly was terrific in a few movies, and very good in several others, but he was also forgettable in a score more – perhaps because those other films were themselves forgettable.

Living in the SF Bay Area, my very first exposure to Robin Williams was in the late 1970s, as a standup comedian in comedy clubs. He was thrilling, energetic to the point of being nearly frenzied, quick on his feet, and unbelievably, gut-bustingly funny – using a myriad of accents, creating dozens of characters and impressions, and racing from one comic thought to another with a breathtaking speed. Throughout his life, Robin had an uncommon ability to improvise, to adlib and to pour out comic quips, off-beat observations, upside-down situations and spot-on characterizations in a comedic stream of consciousness, the likes of which we’ve never seen before, and may never experience again.  His idol, Jonathan Winters, had a similar improvisational, character-driven approach in the Sixties and Seventies, but Robin’s humor was not only much faster, it was broader too, touching on a far wider universe of topics, ranging from international politics to fashion, to genetics, to contemporary morality and more.

There are so many archival moments to commend in Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, far too many to describe here. Among the best, though, is a clip from one of the Comic Relief benefits (raising money to aid the homeless and the hungry) that he hosted along with Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg in the late 1980s; and an amazing appearance at the 2003 Critics Choice Awards show - where Robin was nominated as best actor for his role in One-Hour Photo; and, although he lost out to the other two nominees, Daniel Day Lewis and Jack Nicholson (who tied for the award), he stole the show anyway.

Of course, the documentary is much more than a greatest hits collection or compendium of funny bits. There’s an examination of the off-stage Robin and his inner demons. “He was like a light that didn’t know how to turn itself off,” someone said. Clearly, he was addicted to the rush of endorphins that he got by making others laugh. Too much so to be happy in sobriety?  Hard to say. For a while, there were piles of cocaine and other stimulants as well, although it appears that he eventually learned to steer clear of such stuff.

At the end, the film does not shy away from an examination of Robin’s suicide at age 63 in 2014. He had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and suffered from severe bouts of depression amid early signs of dementia. Family members and others wonder whether a contemplation of the illness and his prognosis led Robin to end his life or if the illness itself made him suicidal. Either way, it was a tragic end to a lustrous life.

The subtitle of Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, by the way, comes from an early stand-up routine Robin performed as part of his act in which he takes the audience inside his head on a whirlwind tour of his madcap, free-associative process. The documentary contains an abbreviated clip of Robin during an appearance on the PBS show Inside the Actors’ Studio, doing much the same thing, albeit with different content. The remarkably unfunny host James Lipton wonders how Robin can possibly come up with his phantasmagorical humorscapes, and asks, “What the hell is going on?”, whereupon Robin stands up and does an incredible three minutes of rapid-fire material on the inner workings of his brain.  You can find this on YouTube, in a more extended version than is included in the film – at one point, he goes to the audience and, borrowing a young woman’s scarf, does another four minutes of inspired improv - with the scarf and his creative mind as the only props.  [Here’s the full eight-minute clip.] In any case, all of this provided a great demonstration of the premise of Lipton's question without actually answering it.  

Similarly, Zenovich’s absorbing documentary is not only a retrospective about Robin William’s life, but like Lipton’s question it’s also an attempt to understand just what was going on inside Robin’s fertile, high-energy, manically comic mind, and what made him tick. In this, it does not quite succeed. I mean, how could it?

Grade: A

1 hour 56 minutes.

Currently streaming exclusively on HBO onDemand, HBONow and HBOGo.

[HBO suggests that availability is only through 8/19/2018. Not sure what happens after that]