For fans, this short movie provides a bit of closure.
For fans, this short movie provides a bit of closure.
A fter Robin Williams hanged himself in 2014, the media speculated that financial troubles or depression related to drug or alcohol use might have been the cause. Without discussing those topics, Williams’s widow, Susan Schneider Williams, is eager to set the record straight and does so in Robin’s Wish, a documentary about the actor’s decline and fall.
Williams, his doctors and his widow say, was suffering from an advanced case of Lewy Body dementia, a spectacularly ironic affliction for a once-manic comic whose rapid-firing neurons created his stage persona in his early years. Longtime friends report in the film that before his death at 63, Williams had developed a habit of standing as still as a statue and staring into space for minutes at a time. Neurologists who treated Williams describe the case as one of the most severe they had ever seen. “It really amazed me that Robin could even walk or move at all,” says neurologist Dr. Bruce Miller. The disease (which also claimed the life of Tom Seaver) is always fatal, the doctor says. There is no treatment.
The documentary isn’t a journalistic inquiry but more of a filmed companion piece to Susan Williams’s op-ed, “The Terrorist Inside My Husband’s Brain,” published in the journal Neurology in 2016. Among those who chime in with thoughts about Williams are David E. Kelley, the creator of The Crazy Ones, Williams’s unsuccessful final sitcom; the comic and director Bobcat Goldthwait; and Shawn Levy, who directed Williams in three Night at the Museum movies. “When you’re in the room with Robin it is full-go,” recalls Levy, but while filming the third Museum movie in 2013, he notes, “Something was going on with Robin.” Williams fumbled his lines. He took to phoning Levy in the middle of the night to express alarm. “I saw his mind crumble,” Levy says sadly. “I saw a guy who wasn’t himself and thought that that was unforgivable.” Williams, repeatedly failing to grasp a single piece of dialogue, told Levy, “I’m not me anymore.”
People started to notice that Williams was favoring his left arm, which seemed to go limp at times. He took to sticking his left hand in a pocket. Mort Sahl, the 93-year-old comic who was among Williams’s many friends, notes that Williams became gripped by delusional and obsessive thinking; after spending an evening with Sahl, the younger man repeatedly texted him that night to ask whether he was still okay. Another friend bought tickets to a James Taylor concert Williams wanted to attend, but when the day came, Williams demurred, saying, “I don’t think I can leave the house.” He was so restless at night that he had taken to sleeping in a separate bedroom from his wife, which was why she didn’t immediately discover his lifeless form. The last night of his existence he spent inside a locked bedroom. When he didn’t emerge from it in the morning, Susan Williams assumed, gratefully, that he was sleeping in.
But as Sahl puts it, Williams “understood the bigness of love,” and several scenes in the documentary are moving and inspiring. Williams threw himself into USO tours, visiting both Iraq and Afghanistan several times, and spent a lot of time one-on-one with wounded troops. At one point, he spent an hour and a half at an injured man’s bedside, each man discussing his fears. As we watch clips of Williams’s fast-talking free-association standup, Kelley marvels that Williams’s intellect was “so beyond ours” that Kelley himself felt he could barely keep up. After losing his friend John Belushi to drugs, Williams entered a twelve-step program and stuck with it till the end. His primary addiction was to long bike rides, and there were no drugs or alcohol in his body when he died.
As a film, Robin’s Wish is marred by a weepy musical score, by inept visual choices (one B-roll sequence shows Susan Williams moving around her home in slo-mo, for no particular reason, as she discusses her husband’s battles), and by cheesy reenactments (such as a portrayal of a final bike ride Williams went on). But for fans, this short movie provides a bit of closure. And it’s a fond reminder that Williams was a rare combination of talents. He should have had many more years to exercise them.