In roughly equal parts, the documentary “Robin’s Wish” strives to honor the career of the peerless actor-comedian Robin Williams and to raise awareness of Lewy body dementia, a form of progressive dementia that was diagnosed in Williams after his death from suicide in 2014.
Williams’s widow, Susan Schneider Williams, has pointed to diffuse Lewy body disease as a cause of her husband’s death, and the director, Tylor Norwood, features her extensively as she describes the anxiety, sleeplessness and paranoia that he experienced in his final years. She quotes him as saying that he wanted to “reboot” his brain.
Neurological specialists explain the mental and physical debilitation that the disease produces. Dr. Bruce L. Miller, the director of the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, says that “it really amazed me that Robin could walk or move at all.” (The credits list a medical doctor and a Ph.D. among the executive producers and cite as consulting partners multiple organizations that promote brain disease research.)
Friends, like Williams’s former Juilliard schoolmate Stanley Wilson and the comedian Mort Sahl, and collaborators, like Shawn Levy, Williams’s director on the “Night at the Museum” movies, share their own reminiscences. And as potentially valuable as “Robin’s Wish” is for illuminating Williams’s death — initial reports noted his past struggles with addiction and depression — it is more affecting and appealing as a tribute. Stories of Williams as a matchless improviser, an unpretentious neighbor and a man who had a gift for consoling others suggest the world lost not just an uproarious presence but a kind one.
Robin’s Wish
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
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‘Robin’s Wish’ Review: Celebrating a Life, Highlighting a Disease - The New York Times
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