Williams brings sober performance in World's Greatest Dad

By Brian Reinhart     9/10/09 7:00pm

Robin Williams has a serious actor's talent trapped in a comedian's brain. Even in his funny movies, he is best when acting with restraint: Witness his subtle performance in the flamboyant romp The Birdcage, or the way his character in Good Morning Vietnam changes as he realizes that war is not a joke.World's Greatest Dad is another comedy in which Williams keeps a straight face. He plays Lance Clayton, an unpopular high school teacher whose poetry class is filled with empty desks, whose novels are rejected by every publisher who reads them and whose son from a long-ago fling is the school's requisite friendless loser.

Not only is his son a loner - he's also causing Lance problems. The boy, Kyle (Spy Kids' Daryl Sabara), is on academic probation with horrible grades, hurls sexual taunts at girls in the hallways and spends his time at home downloading pornography. Early on, Kyle tells the only boy who will put up with him that he has discovered some German porn depicting a man defecating on a woman in bed. Kyle would be eager to try this out, except that every girl at school hates him.

Lance tries to sort things out with his son, but things do not work out as well as he hopes: Kyle chokes to death while experimenting with autoerotic asphyxiation, and Lance's last words to his son are expletives.

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Poor Lance's troubles are just beginning. In his agony and unwillingness to tell the world that his son died while masturbating, Lance forges a suicide note which is leaked to the rest of the school with extraordinary results. Kyle's fictitious cry for help convinces the good people of the F.A. McDonald School that they have misunderstood him, and the note changes their lives.

When the fake suicide note spreads through the halls, the audience is plunged headlong into a black, brilliant satire. Suddenly everyone remembers liking him; the principal realizes that Kyle was not a hateful loner but a genius who was bored. The target of this comedy is one of our society's great sacred cows - our glorification of the recently deceased.

World's Greatest Dad is a movie running away from its own cynicism. It is bleakly funny, but has very few genuine laughs and is relentlessly dark, but with a hopeful ending. Williams is startlingly low key in a performance that will stun anyone who thinks of him as a madcap comic and nothing more. He projects loneliness with an awesome power, and every time he smiles, he only does so after a struggle. Lance does make jokes occasionally, but his jokes are the lame barbs of a lonely man glad to find an audience. The real comedy lies in the situation.

Indeed, in World's Greatest Dad the laughs are on the whole high school population, driven to this frenzy of phoniness. Williams is mainly here to feel the great pain of the movie's moral dilemma. In sacrificing his honesty to preserve his son's reputation, Lance becomes the center of attention. The student body lavishes him with sympathy, daytime talk shows want to interview him and publishing companies ask him to write a book. But Lance knows he is living a lie.

Granted, there are a few problems with this movie. Director Bobcat Goldthwait is too reliant on music as a crutch, shoehorning in loud rock songs at inappropriate moments where silence would have been better. Goldthwait also wrote the screenplay, and in so doing threw in a few brief scenes which are, quite simply, not very interesting. Worst of all, one particular shot treats us to the image of Williams naked, something no moviegoer will want to see.

Ultimately, the darkness of the satire in World's Greatest Dad is a product of its message: We are all too quick to glorify the dead, even if we never respected them in life. In one crucial scene, we see students at the McDonald School wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Kyle's image. Kyle strikes the same pose as fellow shirt icon Che Guevara, and even appears to be wearing Che's hat.

There was nothing about the lives of Kyle and Che that suggested they had earned their heroic status. Sometimes, this movie laments, dying is good enough.

See the trailer on the movie website at www.worldsgreatestdadfilm.com.

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