World's Greatest Dad (2009)
Writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait’s “World's Greatest Dad” is a fine heir to 1988's black comedy “Heathers,” as both films assault our desperate yearning to mythologize the dead and both concern our society's flailing absurdism when faced with our powerless to avert tragedy; both put suicide victims (who in both film’s plots didn’t actually commit suicide) on unrealistic pedestals to assuage our guilt for never being good to people in general while they actually lived. They are over-the-top, acerbic takes on the first section of Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” (novella 1886) making the case that our rituals of grief don’t work, they distance us from sincere emotion and corrupt us by breeding dishonesty; but unlike Tolstory these two films don’t lay the blame on the route-ness of our ritualism, the fault in our society is truly the fault with ourselves.
For the most part “Heathers” and “World's Greatest Dad” dislike the people within them, inviting us to laugh at the characters with smug superiority, as if we, the audience, weren’t the same flawed people ourselves. If anything, “World's Greatest Dad” is more cynical than the earlier film, as the main action unfolds in the world of adults, not teenagers, so the players should really know better, but clearly know even less.
Robin Williams is Lance Clayton, a failed writer, disrespected high school teacher, and the single-father of a particularly loathsome teenager, Kyle, played by Daryl Sabara. Lance a loser who earned his lot by letting everything slip through his fingers. His one redeeming feature is that he sincerely loves Kyle, but his passiveness is so extreme he has long abandoned any attempt to reach out to his withdrawn and hostile son. Without doubt, Kyle doesn’t deserve even that ineffectual love, he’s a compulsive masturbator and makes no effort to conceal it; at his school he's vulgar misogynistic, which is especially humiliating to Lance who is employed there; Kyle is rightfully, almost universally disliked because of his own universal dislike for everyone and everything; even when it comes to his one friend, Andrew, played by Evan Martin, Kyle chooses to be reflexively cruel.
Then Kyle bungles autoerotic asphyxiation and dies. In the film’s most heart-rending and compassionate sequence, Lance covers up the truth of his son’s death with a phony suicide note, he tries to restore Kyle’s dignity in death by imagining what his impenetrable sons inner life may have been. He imagines a fictional son more tolerable than the real one, and writes with lucid insight about the inner pain that the unloved and unregarded feel. This moment of humanity is how the film sets up its main plot, because the note goes viral, elevating dead Kyle to object of cult of veneration among the students, teachers, and media, all whom seem desperate for a public display of humanity that won’t cost them the real emotional effort of honest empathy.
It is here that the film, already mean spirited, really shows it real teeth, because Lance’s lie opens a whole new world of opportunity to him. He is embraced by a community that seeks to participate vicariously in fame, able to bask in his dead son's reflected glory, and recast in their eyes as a heroic father. Everything is better for him, notably his sex life. Does Lance feel guilty profiting from his son's death? Not really, it already established that Lance is not a real hero, just someone who wants to be treated as such. His passivity doesn’t disappear, and perversely it serves him well, because in the snowballing events, as he reaps more and more ill-gotten gain, all he has to do is continue to pretend the same things everyone else wants to pretend. The world is his if he plays by the rules of the lie.
Robin Williams is terrific, buttressing the entire film. His performance is understated in the over-the-top situation, fully appreciative of complexity in this character and in his circumstances. He allows you to sympathize with Lance even though the film makes it clear he doesn’t really deserve it. That sympathy lends the film a moral ambiguity, and that, more than the twisted conceit, is what gives the audience twinges of discomfort.
In the end though, “World's Greatest Dad” pulls itself back from the cliff of complete nihilism more definitively than “Heathers,” choosing a redemption that comes at a really high cost, a self-inflicted public humiliation and censor. A number of critics did not like that it ended, as Roger Ebert put it, “But he loses his nerve just before the earth is completely scorched...Audiences think they like bleak pessimism, but they expect the plane to pull out of its dive and land safely.” I disagree, the film took us to a very black place, and we were happy to follow. When the title character chose to step off that path, he did so in a way that we all understand few of us would be brave enough to do (though of course few of us would’ve gone so far down the path as he did in the first place). I saw some real boldness in how the film chose to resolve.
Also, not for nothing, it also provided Williams with one of the single most powerful preformed scenes of his entire career.
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