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closeWednesday, Sep. 02, 2009
Taking 'Dad' aim
From director Bobcat Goldthwait -- yes, that guy -- comes one of the year's most original films.
By Christopher Kelly
Among the least expected developments in cinema this decade: the emergence of comedian Bobcat Goldthwait as a film director of extraordinary purpose and imagination. Goldthwait’s Sleeping Dogs Lie was a wickedly perverse but sly and original comedy about a decent woman struggling to keep secret a shocking sexual impropriety from the past; for all its juvenile humor and visual clunkiness, it showed potential.
In World’s Greatest Dad, the writer-director pushes the provocations even further. Robin Williams plays Lance Clayton, a high-school poetry teacher who dreams of becoming a world-famous novelist. At school, he’s carrying on a clandestine affair with a much younger fellow teacher (Alexie Gilmore), who has eyes for another teacher at the school. At home, Lance is struggling with his angry, masturbation-obsessed teenage son, Kyle (Daryl Sabara).
But what begins as a cynical shaggy-dog story about the disappointments of middle age takes a shocking and abrupt turn: Kyle dies in an autoerotic-asphyxiation accident. Consumed by embarrassment, Lance passes the death off as a suicide. Realizing that Kyle is far more popular in death than he was in real life, Lance even goes so far as to write a fake journal and credit it to the deceased boy. At long last, he becomes the famous writer he always dreamed he could be.
Williams’ superb performance — one of his best — forces us to sympathize with this clearly damaged man. But Goldthwait is the real star of this increasingly unnerving show. The screenplay, which finds Lance journeying to Los Angeles to appear on an Oprah Winfrey-like show to talk about Kyle’s journal, is a full-frontal assault on our culture of obsessive parenting, and particularly the widespread insistence that every child, even the most obnoxious and clearly imbecilic, is "special" in his own way.
Goldthwait’s direction is just as impressive: He mixes bursts of abrasive comedy (Kyle has a thing for watching his saggy, elderly neighbor, played by Mitzi McCall, change into her nightgown) with surprisingly poetic flourishes (watch out for the montage set to I Hope I Become a Ghost by the Deadly Syndrome). And whereas the shock tactics in Sleeping Dogs Lie were easy to dismiss as a kind of shrill, attention-grabbing extension of Goldthwait’s stand-up routine, this time there’s real weight and emotion underlying the bizarre twists. By the time Williams strips completely naked, in an exultant, oddly poignant climax, World’s Greatest Dad has revealed itself to be a true sleeper: a movie that sneaks up on you and leaves you completely arrested.
Rated R (strong sexual content, strong language, nudity, drug use); 98 min.
At the Angelika in Dallas
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