Dec. 16, 2009 - Issue #739: Melissa AdM

DVD Detective

WORLD’S GREATEST DAD

In the proper role, Robin Williams can be a surprisingly effective actor

Robin Williams is not generally a name you want to see anywhere in a film's credits, at least if you're between about eight and 50 years old (people who were around before he was Mork seem to be endlessly charmed by his manic comedy and schmaltzy sentimentalism, and kids usually respond pretty well to shameless mugging). He is the kind of weird icon who connects powerfully with certain mindsets and is basically a complete anathema to everyone else, like a toad whose vibrant colours say pretty to the naive and distant and absolute poison to anything that's actually going to have to digest it.

But the truly strange thing about him is that, if reigned in and deployed properly, Robin Williams can actually be a shockingly good, effective actor. It's like the cloying and hamminess just melt away, and all of the sudden there's this subdued, troubled man on screen: The World According to Garp was the earliest example, with his restless wackiness sort of turned back against him, and more recently One Hour Photo exploited the creepier side of his ingratiating warmth and Death to Smoochy tweaked his tired comedy.

Now we can add to that World's Greatest Dad, written and directed by another divisively odd comedian, Bobcat Goldthwait. Dad is Goldwait's third feature, and while I can't speak to his early-'90s flop Shakes the Clown, Sleeping Dogs Lie, his more recent 2006 flick, was an off-kilter, juveniley crude but still sharply observed dramedy, and World's Greatest Dad expands and deepens that, dragging Williams along for the ride.
Williams stars as Lance Clayton, a sad-sack failed writer who is getting by as a teacher of high-school poetry, sending out manuscript after failed manuscript. He's overshadowed by another charming teacher at work, the art teacher he's dating seems to be half out at all times and at home his foul-mouthed son Kyle would rather hunt for beat-off material and participate in autoerotic asphyxiation than talk.

But from those beginnings, which seem pretty standard and just kind of gleefully crude—for a time, Goldthwait just seems to be indulging a predilection for laughing at sex, which occasionally inflicted Sleeping Dogs Lie—comes an incredible twist. I'd prefer not to ruin it, just because the punch of it is definitely best taken as shock, but the entire back half of the movie sort of depends on it, so (spoiler alert, obviously): Kyle accidentally kills himself while masturbating with a belt around his neck, and in an effort to save all involved the embarrassment, Lance stages a suicide, complete with typed note. The really interesting bits start when Kyle's supposed note gets out, and begins to change the lives of the students at his school. Finally finding the audience and attention he's always dreamed of, Lance eventually slaps together a memoir, which quickly goes national, and all of a sudden he's a famous author, albeit channelled through his supposedly suicidal son.

This entire part is basically a long, sharp satire on the culture of tragedy, the mawkish and disgusting habit of humans to turn what are very often personal experiences into a public opportunity to outdo one another in displays of sadness. Girls who previously shunned Kyle now compete for his Bruce Hornby CDs, the quarterback who bullied him finds the strength to come out of the closet, the school principal wants to dedicate a library in his honour. Meanwhile, Lance finds nothing in the way of actual comfort for any of this, partly because he's staging an elaborate lie, but mostly because almost everyone around him is more interested in their own falsified version of the event and how it's affecting them.
World's Greatest Dad is ultimately such a great satire because it doesn't draw much attention to what it's skewering and instead focuses on Lance, and here's where Williams really surprises. His Lance is a very affecting kind of pathetic, not overplayed but lived in: his initial reaction to the note's popularity, and even his decision to fake the memoir, feel like the actions of a desperate man dealing with his failures as both a man and a father. When he starts to go further, like using Kyle's memoir to finally nail down that cute teacher, we don't exactly cheer him on, but we feel his pain, and the whole bit works as a nice microcosm for the gross kind of satisfaction that Lance gets from being a respected writer in another's skin.

By the end, though, Lance does sort of grow, and he certainly reaches a level of understanding that none of the other delusional people who inhabited Kyle's world will allow themselves. The actual ending is a bit pat, although it's delivered with a refreshing bluntness and it does manage to serve both character and conceit pretty well. And anyway, you have to admire a film that's willing to puncture our cherished notions of sentimentality and tragedy, all while making Robin Williams give a subtle, worthwhile performance. V

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