It’s a fine overview, and as one reviewer wrote, “tantalizingly incomplete.” The basic challenge isn’t hard to pinpoint; how does one narrow the man’s body of work to snippets capable of being fitted into two hours, much less interpret them?
Come Inside My Mind: star-studded documentary honors Robin Williams, by Jake Nevins (The Guardian)
Director Marina Zenovich talks about translating Williams’ comedy to the screen, his inner demons, and what compels her about complicated men
… Fashioned from archival footage, old audio tapes, interviews with Williams’ contemporaries and clips of the comic’s stand-up, Come Inside My Mind is the first documentary to comprehensively examine Williams’ life and art since his suicide in 2014. It includes virtually no narration, save for Williams’ own, which can have an eerie, almost ghostlike effect (if only ghosts were as charming and exuberant as Robin Williams). “Every person is driven by some deep, deep, deep, deep secret,” he says in voiceover about halfway through the film.
It’s a question Williams scarcely addressed, preferring to bare his soul by way of performance. “Steve Martin says in the film, when Robin was on stage, whether it was theater or standup, he was in charge,” says Zenovich. “But in his life he was trying to hold himself together.” Still, the comic’s embattled sense of sense worth threatened to impose itself on an otherwise supremely confident stage persona. As he says in voiceover, recalling advice from a shrink: “Be careful what you talk about, because you may be on stage in front of so many people and start talking about something you’re not able to deal with” …
