World’s Greatest Dad (***)

Directed by: Bobcat Goldthwait

Starring: Robin Williams, Daryl Sabara, Alexie Gilmore, Evan Martin, Henry Simmons

Seen: July 9th 2010

*** Out of ****

Lance Clayton (Williams) is a late-middle-aged man with just about nothing going for him except a tinge of romance. All of his numerous novels have been rejected by publishers; his poetry class in school is slowly suffocating because of the popularity of Mike (Simmons), another teacher’s prose class; and his son is like a preview of hell – an underachieving, sex-obsessed 15-year old with no respect for any social conventions. Lance’s girlfriend won’t acknowledge him in public which makes this single victory in his life somewhat hollow, but he goes on regardless. The night that Claire (Gilmore) decides to take Lance out to a public place where they will definitely be seen together, she invites his son Kyle (Sabara) too, and they have a great evening while Kyle happily takes pictures of Claire underwear under the table. Lance drops Kyle off at home before taking Claire home, where he doesn’t stay for long, but when he gets back home, he finds Kyle dead, having accidentally strangled himself while engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation – with the photos of Claire on his computer screen.

In an effort to grant his son the dignity that he didn’t have while alive, he rearranges things so it looks like Kyle hung himself, and writes a suicide note on behalf of Kyle before calling it in. During the week, as things start normalising, someone finds Kyle’s supposed suicide note, and it’s published in the school paper – and it spreads like wildfire; Kyle is suddenly famous, meaning by extension Lance is suddenly famous. The children rip everything out of proportion in creating a messiah figure of sorts out of Kyle, and Lance rides the wave, his sense of pride in his suicide note growing to such a degree that he writes a novel in Kyle’s name, which gets published under the name “You Don’t Know Me”, and it is distributed at the school. The novel continues to explode Lance’s sense of self, and only the sane voice of Andrew (Martin), Kyle’s only friend complaining about things not seeming quite right, keeps Lance from completely taking off. Things are however headed towards an inevitable breakdown, and the movie manages to link that moment with the movie’s opening moment extremely well – by elaborating on Lance’s worst fear as voiced by him in the opening lines of the movie.

Robin Williams brings a rare return to his brilliant form from the early 90’s, which, unfortunately, he has already followed up on with Old Dogs. His comic timing is pitch perfect, but it is in the hardest scene of the movie where he grabs your attention the most, the death of Lance Clayton’s son and Lance’s tragic reaction to it. Daryl Sabara drags loathing from the viewer in his portrayal of Kyle, a vile person with no redeeming qualities whatsoever; Alexie Gilmore is sweet as Lance’s much younger girlfriend and while Henry Simmons is initially pretty great as Lance’s (healthy) competition for Claire and class, he is relegated to too much of a sidelined caricature during the final half of the movie in the way he reacts to Lance and Claire’s relationship and events in general. The movie is not for the soft-hearted, as the language employed by Sabara is vile, and the nature of his death will upset people, as it did me. The emotional impact of the film climaxes about 10 minutes too early, leaving Lance’s actual unhanding out in the cold. World’s Greatest Dad is definitely not for everyone, maybe not even for a limited audience, but those who enjoy very dark comedy and drama should find some moments of beauty in this otherwise rather uninspiring movie.