32: Anger can be Nasty

32 

Anger can be Nasty 

Reflections on Robin Williams’s role in

The Angriest Man in Brooklyn. 

“I can see that man committing suicide,” I said, thinking out loud as Penny and I watched Robin Williams in his role as the angry lawyer Henry Altmann in The Angriest Man in Brooklyn that was released on DVD on August 19, just eight days after his suicide on August 11, 2014. Robin hanged himself, and his death was attributed to depression; but whatever caused this brilliant actor to take his own life, it broke the world’s heart.

I had no idea that The Angriest Man in Brooklyn was made a few months before Robin committed suicide and released shortly after his death, so my feelings about the misanthropic lawyer Henry Altmann weren’t influenced by that knowledge; I went online after the movie to check it out, and what I learned confirmed my feelings about Robin Williams.

For the longest time I’ve had the belief that the character an actor plays chooses the actor and not the other way around, just as I believe that every novel that a writer writes chooses the author and not the author the novel; which speaks to the mystical process of individuation through our own karmic destiny’ that’s why I thought what I did about Robin Williams as his character Henry Altmann spewed his vitriol onto the world.

Anger can be nasty, and Robin Williams must have had a lot of pent-up anger that he channeled into his character Henry Altmann; that’s why I felt that he was acting out his own drama as much as the drama of the character he was playing, which begs the humorous, albeit ironic question: who was playing whom in The Angriest Man in Brooklyn?

The plotline of Henry Altmann’s personal story is very simple but contrived to the point of incredulity; but be that as it may, the anger that Altmann displayed spoke to an emotion that we’re all familiar with, and I watched it to the end despite how boring and predictable it proved to be. Penny walked out half way through and went to bed.

I felt compelled to watch it to the end, though; because I knew that Henry Altmann would tell me something about the life of an actor that I admired ever since he landed as an alien from another planet on the TV sitcom Mork & Mindy, a role that launched Robin Williams’ acting career and in some mysterious way imprinted his comedic genius; and as Henry Altmann vented his uncalled-for anger to the young female doctor who was covering for his regular doctor, she spitefully told him that he only had 90 minutes left to live because of the brain aneurism that she had discovered when she perused his medical chart for his follow-up visit after his cat scan for the headaches he was experiencing, and Altmann angrily stormed out of the hospital to make the most of his remaining 90 minutes.

But why was Henry Altmann so angry at the world? And if he was so angry, why was Robin Williams who for my money was playing out his own anger as the malcontent Henry Altmann? I can’t say, really; and I have to call upon my Muse to help me find an answer to this troubling issue of anger in today’s spiritual musing… 

I don’t know enough about Robin William’s personal life to draw any definite conclusion, but I trust my instincts enough to suspect that his character Henry Altmann gave Robin William’s an opportunity to vent his venomous rage at the world; and as presumptuous as this may be, what I read online about Robin Williams seems to confirm my intuition.

Married three times and father of three, Robin had a history of drug and alcohol abuse and went to rehab to quit his addiction. He had unexpected heart surgery, which forced him to acknowledge his mortality, and he took up serious cycling for his health; but shortly before he took his life he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and some say this triggered his suicide. In a statement released shortly after her husband’s death, Susan Schneider said that Robin was struggling with depression, anxiety, and the Parkinson’s diagnosis when he died. In a word, Robin Williams had a full, highly successful, and emotionally complex life.

In The Angriest Man in Brooklyn, Henry Altman’s pent-up anger was set free when he learned of his son’s tragic accidental death; and his anger grew from day to day. The Angriest Man in Brooklyn begins with Altmann’s car getting smashed by a taxi driver who runs a red light, and Altman’s rages with explosive fury at the foreign cabby. This sets the stage for his doctor’s appointment that releases the molten lava of his anger at the world.

Anger is as common to man as rain is to the weather, and it comes and goes; but when it rains, it also pours and one can drown in raw emotion. Henry Altmann was drowning, and when he goaded the frustrated doctor to tell him how much time he had left to live she deliberately but mistakenly told him that he only had 90 minutes; and Altmann takes stock of his life and decides to make amends with his family, starting with the son he had abandoned after his other son’s tragic death, and the story unfolds in a comedy of tragic misadventures.

As contrived and idiotic as the plotline was (one reviewer said the movie was rescued by Robin’s suicide from obscurity where it belonged, and I don’t disagree), I had to watch it to the end to see how Henry Altmann resolved his anger issues because I know what I had to go through to resolve my own issues with anger, and it wasn’t easy; but I prefer a happy ending to a sad one, and I’m glad that Henry Altmann died with his family by his side.

But Robin Williams didn’t. He hung his belt around his neck and took his own life, and his wife and children were nowhere near his side. Henry Altmann tried to commit suicide by jumping into the Hudson River when he failed to connect with his son and was running out of precious time, but the young doctor who condemned him to 90 minutes of life ran down to the river’s edge and swam out and saved her patient’s life; and the movie ended in happy resolution for everyone when they threw Henry Altmann’s ashes back into the river.

But this was only a movie, and one of Robin William’s worst; and the only thing that salvaged it for me was Henry Altmann’s anger, because my gut told me that Robin Williams had been called to play this role to vent his own anger at the world, and it told me more about the man than all of his other movies put together.