Movie Review ‘Robin’s Wish’: Robin Williams Documentary Offers Closure for Fans

After 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.

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Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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After 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.