Seize the Day (1986)

Robin Williams always made me nervous. His protean free-association stand-up comedy seemed in equal parts antic and frantic to me. Watching him on TV made me feel like I was an audience member close to the stage, fearful that he might single me out. 

I have been wanting for decades to see the film that was made in 1986 of Saul Bellow’s short novel Seize the Day. It was first broadcast on PBS’ Great Performances program, but I don’t recall if I saw it then. I didn’t read the Bellow novel until last year. What I wrote about it then didn’t do it the justice it deserved:  

It is the strangeness and suddenness of the novel's last scene that catches the reader by surprise. Having lived through Tommy Wilhelm's long day alongside him, feeling his rising frustration and the congestion in his chest, and his inability to explain to his father or his wife or to Tamkin, the charlatan whose cockeyed wisdom causes Tommy to trust him enough to invest his remaining savings in the trading fortunes of lard on the stock exchange, what he is feeling, what he wants in his life, made the release of his tears, at the side of a strange man's coffin, provoked by his love and his fear and his grief at the waste of half his life, an utterly convincing and uplifting conclusion to his day. 

Alfred Kazin said it better: 

Seize the Day [is] the painfully exact American tragedy of our affluent day . . . The protagonist is the city man who feels that the sky is constantly coming down on him. Before he dies, he will make it clear that his greatest need is not money or love or the “peace” he vainly seeks out of the city, but the reason of things. No one in history ever felt the loss of this so keenly as the modern man who lives in the most “developed” society of all time. 

Williams never had good prospects for an actor. You could see from his comedy routines that he didn’t have much control over himself. Even in comedic roles his directors let him go too far. The role of Tommy Wilhelm in Seize the Day required him to keep it together until the last scene and then let go. But Williams acts like he’s already lost it in the very first shot of him speeding down a country road in a beat-up station wagon, talking to himself, impatiently lighting a cigarette (he smokes through the whole film, or pretends to), and flipping the bird at his boss. At times his level of intensity is too loud. He steals his scenes only because you’re not sure he might explode at any moment. 

His last scenes, after he loses everything on the commodities exchange, are increasingly embarrassing – dashing down the New York streets screaming (where is he running?), scaring people out of the way until he thinks he sees Tamkin entering a building in a crowd and he finds himself at the funeral of someone he doesn’t even know. In the novel, Tommy is in the line of mourners, passing the body in the coffin, and he breaks down in tears, weeping uncontrollably. It is overwhelming as written by Bellow. In the film, Tommy’s breakdown is off-putting. Baring his teeth like he’s about to give out with his Whitmanesque yawp, Robin Williams pulls a grotesque face and starts to bawl like a child. 

Williams – and the film’s producers – counted too much on his popularity and, like Tommy Wilhelm, got in over his head and lost. It’s a pity because he’s accompanied by a few good actors. Thomas Wiseman (who quite fittingly once played Dr. No in the very first James Bond film) is perfectly imperious as Tommy’s father, determined to resist every appeal for help from his son. Glenne Headly is lovely as Olive, Tommy’s Roman Catholic girlfriend, who waits patiently while he disentangles himself from his too demanding ex-wife. Jerry Stiller astounds as Dr. Tamkin, an old school bullshitter who both inspires Tommy and fleeces him of his last $600. He is completely deliberate in taking advantage of Tommy’s ignorance of money and calmly disappears the moment Tommy realizes he’s been had. (The film should’ve been rated R for the scene in which Stiller goes shirtless in the bath house shower. The strange proportions of his body defy description.) Jo Van Fleet is delightful as old Mrs. Einhorn, who is seen only in elevators with her incontinent dachshunds. And when Tommy has to (reluctantly) help Tom Aldredge (as the half-blind trader Rappaport) across the street to a tobacco store and then has to practically carry him back before the light changes, you will wonder at the direction of TV veteran Fielder Cook. And Saul Bellow himself appears passing Tommy in the hotel hallway dressed in a stylish trenchcoat and hat. 

One scene comes close to the optimum sadness expressed in Bellow of Tommy’s unrequited love for his father. Near the end of the film Tommy makes his way through the Hotel Gloriana’s subterranean steam room looking for his father. He passes several old men laid out as if on slabs waiting for the masseur. Tommy recognizes his father, lying on his stomach. The way the scene is shot (by Eric Van Haren Noman) is extraordinary: the old doctor turns over to address his son, exposing his naked torso, covered in sweat, his neck tendons straining, his eyes bulging, as he rejects Tommy’s final appeal – for money, yes, but also for help, and ultimately for love. Dr. Adler cruelly rejects his appeals. “You want to make yourself into my cross, but I’m not gonna let you do that. Get away from me now. It’s torture for me to look at you, you slob!” 

The production is as good as one had any reason to expect, even for PBS’ Great Performances. The period costumes, the art direction, the cars in the streets and some well-chosen locations present to us a point blank and actual Manhattan in 1956. It would’ve been far more moving if the lead had been played by a real actor (like Cristopher Walken, for example) instead of by a comic quite outside of his element. This was the first straight role for Williams, who played in The World According to Garp and Moscow on the Hudson prior to Seize the Day. He would improve as a dramatic actor as he got older, but only because the material was shaped to suit his unique talents.