WORLD'S GREATEST DAD (2009), dir. Bobcat Goldthwait
SITE ARCHIVE! (REGULARLY UPDATED)
This review was originally posted at Cinemaspy.com
Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait might be best remembered for his voice, which resembles a perennially-stalled car engine, but he’s developed into an accomplished director who can generate laughs and pathos from problematic material. His 2006 Sleeping Dogs Lie revolves around an act of bestiality, and his latest features auto-erotic asphyxiation as a plot point. But in World’s Greatest Dad, he also dares to show the parent-teenager relationship as the simmering pot of antagonism that it can be, and adolescents for the borderline-sociopaths they often are.
Robin Williams plays Lance, a failed writer whose day job is teaching a sparsely-attended high school poetry course. He’s also the single dad of Kyle (Daryl Sabara), who as offspring go, might embody the nightmare of every remotely-dorky thirty-something contemplating whether to procreate. Kyle shows little intellectual potential, and his knee-jerk response to any cultural activities is mean. ("The only thing more queer than music are the people who listen to it," is a typical Kyle-ism.) Apparently, his only interest is pleasuring himself in strange and potentially-lethal ways. When such an adventure goes terribly wrong, Lance frames it as a suicide, going so far as to fabricate a good-bye note.
However, being the writer he is, Lance can’t help but embellish a little bit, making Kyle out to be smarter, more tortured and less of an asshole than he really was. Luckily, aside from the one student who was Kyle’s only friend (Evan Martin), no one else knew him well enough to say otherwise. But when the note gets out, Kyle quickly becomes an object of obsession among the entire school, romanticized by the Goth girls who scorned him, even embraced by the principal, who was a half-step away from expelling him.
Lance doesn’t help matters by faking his son’s supposed memoirs, and painting him as a closeted genius who loved Emily Dickinson. But one gets the feeling that if he had said Kyle admired Fred from Scooby-Doo, the kids would have all shown up the next day wearing orange-colored ascots. Goldthwait, who also wrote the screenplay, has something to say about how we idealize the dead, and how we tend to try drawing connections between tragic figures and ourselves. Why do we do it? In the case of Kyle, it’s a lot easier than getting to know him when he was alive. However, in filling in the proverbial blanks with false details and their own imaginations, Kyle gradually turns into the opposite of what he had been in real life.
We get treated to many, many shots of Kyle’s likeness reduced to a brand, but there are also a few scenes showing students taking genuine inspiration from his made-up story, and I would have liked if the film’s second half spent a little more time arguing why Lance should consider keeping up the ruse. Instead, everyone around him becomes self-absorbed, at which point it’s easy to root for him to call it all off. More screen time could also have been given to the Evan Martin character, who represents the real victim of Lance’s fraud: he wasn’t just Kyle’s only friend; it was true the other way around, too, and now his memory is the one that seems to matter the least.
But overall, World’s Greatest Dad pulls off the trick of being very funny with pretty dark material. Williams, who gives his best lead performance in years, manages to shoulder the entire second half by being largely reactive; one of the movie’s assets is his impish grin, which in scenes where peripheral characters wax touchy-feely about how "being a parent is the toughest job you’ll ever love" or his late son’s gift for prose, seems to take on a life of its own. At the same time, Williams imbues Lance with weighty and tangible sadness, which is surprising until one recalls he did the same in The Fisher King and Good Will Hunting.
As for the first half, it flies by on the relationship between father and son, which feels genuine in its propensity for emotional scarring. I give Goldthwait and Sabara equal credit for their keenly-observed, perfectly-executed teenage misanthrope, who proves thoroughly unlikable, but not in a cartoon way. The key was making Kyle pathetic. In a terrific scene early on, he instigates a fight wherein he gets his ass handed to him, but adding insult to injury is the other student isn’t even the jock Kyle accuses him of being. "I’m not a jock. I don’t even play sports," Kyle is told while being held down and struck.
In another standout moment, after his father purchases him an expensive new computer monitor, Kyle’s sullen response is, "It’s not even the biggest one." While it’s painful seeing this bratty kid’s combination of entitlement and ingratitude, we know that’s part of what adolescence is all about. In fact, these scenes underscore the sadness of what eventually transpires, because we watch Sabara play this petulant bastard early on and think to ourselves, "He’s just going through an obnoxious phase." Sadly, he never gets a chance to grow out of it.
This review was originally posted at Cinemaspy.com
Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait might be best remembered for his voice, which resembles a perennially-stalled car engine, but he’s developed into an accomplished director who can generate laughs and pathos from problematic material. His 2006 Sleeping Dogs Lie revolves around an act of bestiality, and his latest features auto-erotic asphyxiation as a plot point. But in World’s Greatest Dad, he also dares to show the parent-teenager relationship as the simmering pot of antagonism that it can be, and adolescents for the borderline-sociopaths they often are.
Robin Williams plays Lance, a failed writer whose day job is teaching a sparsely-attended high school poetry course. He’s also the single dad of Kyle (Daryl Sabara), who as offspring go, might embody the nightmare of every remotely-dorky thirty-something contemplating whether to procreate. Kyle shows little intellectual potential, and his knee-jerk response to any cultural activities is mean. ("The only thing more queer than music are the people who listen to it," is a typical Kyle-ism.) Apparently, his only interest is pleasuring himself in strange and potentially-lethal ways. When such an adventure goes terribly wrong, Lance frames it as a suicide, going so far as to fabricate a good-bye note.
However, being the writer he is, Lance can’t help but embellish a little bit, making Kyle out to be smarter, more tortured and less of an asshole than he really was. Luckily, aside from the one student who was Kyle’s only friend (Evan Martin), no one else knew him well enough to say otherwise. But when the note gets out, Kyle quickly becomes an object of obsession among the entire school, romanticized by the Goth girls who scorned him, even embraced by the principal, who was a half-step away from expelling him.
Lance doesn’t help matters by faking his son’s supposed memoirs, and painting him as a closeted genius who loved Emily Dickinson. But one gets the feeling that if he had said Kyle admired Fred from Scooby-Doo, the kids would have all shown up the next day wearing orange-colored ascots. Goldthwait, who also wrote the screenplay, has something to say about how we idealize the dead, and how we tend to try drawing connections between tragic figures and ourselves. Why do we do it? In the case of Kyle, it’s a lot easier than getting to know him when he was alive. However, in filling in the proverbial blanks with false details and their own imaginations, Kyle gradually turns into the opposite of what he had been in real life.
We get treated to many, many shots of Kyle’s likeness reduced to a brand, but there are also a few scenes showing students taking genuine inspiration from his made-up story, and I would have liked if the film’s second half spent a little more time arguing why Lance should consider keeping up the ruse. Instead, everyone around him becomes self-absorbed, at which point it’s easy to root for him to call it all off. More screen time could also have been given to the Evan Martin character, who represents the real victim of Lance’s fraud: he wasn’t just Kyle’s only friend; it was true the other way around, too, and now his memory is the one that seems to matter the least.
But overall, World’s Greatest Dad pulls off the trick of being very funny with pretty dark material. Williams, who gives his best lead performance in years, manages to shoulder the entire second half by being largely reactive; one of the movie’s assets is his impish grin, which in scenes where peripheral characters wax touchy-feely about how "being a parent is the toughest job you’ll ever love" or his late son’s gift for prose, seems to take on a life of its own. At the same time, Williams imbues Lance with weighty and tangible sadness, which is surprising until one recalls he did the same in The Fisher King and Good Will Hunting.
As for the first half, it flies by on the relationship between father and son, which feels genuine in its propensity for emotional scarring. I give Goldthwait and Sabara equal credit for their keenly-observed, perfectly-executed teenage misanthrope, who proves thoroughly unlikable, but not in a cartoon way. The key was making Kyle pathetic. In a terrific scene early on, he instigates a fight wherein he gets his ass handed to him, but adding insult to injury is the other student isn’t even the jock Kyle accuses him of being. "I’m not a jock. I don’t even play sports," Kyle is told while being held down and struck.
In another standout moment, after his father purchases him an expensive new computer monitor, Kyle’s sullen response is, "It’s not even the biggest one." While it’s painful seeing this bratty kid’s combination of entitlement and ingratitude, we know that’s part of what adolescence is all about. In fact, these scenes underscore the sadness of what eventually transpires, because we watch Sabara play this petulant bastard early on and think to ourselves, "He’s just going through an obnoxious phase." Sadly, he never gets a chance to grow out of it.
Labels: ***, 2009, Bobcat Goldthwait, Robin Williams
posted by Phil | 2:01 PM
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