If ever there was a film destined for significant reappraisal due to real life events, this one is it. It stars Robin Williams as a dying man, given 90 minutes to live, running around acting like a crazy nut, trying, with varying degrees of success, to make amends for some of life's big mistakes.
In the wake of Williams' suicide, the film takes on a life and meaning that no one involved could have imagined. There is a pre attached melancholy to proceedings as we watch Williams, playing Henry Altmann, indulge in the type of profanity laden, over the top, angry insults that we will remember him for, all with the certain knowledge that Henry's actions, like William's performance, are amongst the last things this man will do.
This is more than likely the last time we will see Williams playing Williams in a film, and it is a fitting last hurrah. A performance laced with the humanity we are used to from Wiliams, but tempered by an evident weariness and more than a hint of regret, and ending on a note of melancholy.
The support cast are all capable, and the third person narrative works well. the script is not quite as clever as it thinks it is, but does combine minor plot strands reasonably coherently. The film could have been helped from more time being given to Kunis' back story. Instead, the audience is given enough information about her to follow what's happening, and that's it.
At the end of the film, Henry's loved ones are left, as we are, in a state of mourning, when all we can do is pay tribute, share memories, and remember with laughter a life that ended far sooner and more abruptly than we had time to process. A life that touched us in a way not evident until it was over. Angriest Man in Brooklyn, unwittingly captures what all of us were feeling on August 11 2014. And for that reason, if no other, needs to be watched.
