World's Greatest Dad

Picked this one up at a 3-for-$10 at the Rogers' Video on the way to Eugene's New Year's Eve party, but to be honest I'd been trying to see it for a while.  Bobcat Goldthwait, whose comedy is a heck of a lot deeper and smarter than that high-strung Police Academy character I knew him as before (thanks, Meeplemart Steve, for showing me the way there), wrote and directed this movie as a sort of Robin Williams vehicle, and a sort of story about loneliness, isolation, and broken and reconstituted families.  I heard about it on Adam Carolla's Podcast last year ('09, actually, at this point), and it sounded dark and twisted enough to stand up to Bad Santa in my "Fiasco Comedy" shrine.

Well, like I say about so many movies, it's not quite as funny or sharp as Bad Santa.  That's not a huge strike against it, though; it's going for something a little bit different, though it's still morbidly fascinated with weird sexual obsessions and characters so unrepentantly loathsome that you worry how you'll be able to stand an hour and a half of them.

In this movie, though, the loathsome character is the kid, Kyle (played by Spy Kids' Daryl Sabara, who was charming and awesome in that, and is riveting and awful in this), and as most of the promotional material indicates, Kyle is more of a supporting character: it's Robin Williams' character Lance that is the focus of this film's proceedings.  Lance is Kyle's frustrated father, frustrated teacher, frustrated writer who just can't make it work, but tries like crazy not to take it out on people, though Kyle pushes him to his absolute limit.  Midway into the proceedings, Lance takes advantage of a horrible (if inevitable) tragedy to bolster his writing career, his teaching career, and his love life.

There's not a whole lot to say about the narrative, as it's generally a simple morality fable about being true to yourself and the people you love, or hate, but either way being honest.  There were a lot of "what does that expression mean?" moments from supporting characters -- the kind of awkward pause that can be a tremendous source of humour, but if not carefully managed can make you wonder exactly what a given expression means.  I point to shows like Lost or Arrested Development, or films like Iron Man, as examples of works that are carefully enough directed and edited to ensure that no glance, no expression and no pause by an actor is divergent to the story; that they all mean something, and by paying attention to them, we get a sense of what the character is thinking or what their goals are.

But World's Greatest Dad isn't a movie about characters' calculated ambitions; unlike Bad Santa this isn't a movie about well-intentioned schemes and scams that take people into dark and dangerous places.  This is a movie about messy people, their messy lives, and what can come to them if they're willing to be lying bastards and play into people's wishes and expectations.  The trick, of course, is that to do so is to be so contemptibly insincere as to make honest relationships completely impossible.  So there you have the movie's simple dilemma and its concept.

It's not for everyone, but it's oddly sweet.  Robin Williams is a totally different kind of father from his character in Mrs. Doubtfire, and he's worth watching in this exercise in nebbishy ambition.  It's a bit hard to find -- never got a really wide release, not exactly filling the video shelves and oddly not on Canadian Netflix -- but I'm glad I dug it up.