FILM REVIEW: WORLD'S GREATEST DAD

World's Greatest Dad writer-director-actor Bobcat Goldthwait joins his leading man (Robin Williams) in front of the camera.

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By John Esther

In the first enjoyable film I have seen of his since One Hour Photo in 2002, Robin Williams takes on the role of Lance Clayton, a depressing little man in Bobcat Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad.

Hardly the John Keating of Dead Poet's Society, Lance fails to muster any enthusiasm amongst his poetry class students. With cuts in the school, Lance is the first on the chopping block if he cannot turn it around. If that were not stressful enough for the unpublished writer, Lance has managed to attract the school art teacher, Claire (Alexie Gilmore), a woman out of Lance's league who wants to keep their affair a secret from the rest of the school. He is doing everything to keep her, but there is rivalry in the air for her attention.

While there may be some competition for Claire, when it comes to Lance's son, Kyle (Daryl Sabara), everybody is a loser. An unrelenting jerk, Kyle is causing problems for his dad at home and school. If somebody does not do something quick, father and son are doomed.

Saved by the belt, so to speak, Lance finds an outlet to his miserable life after an auto accident involving a picture of Claire's crotch.

Now, in the age of interchangeable identities through self-pity, self-gratification and self-delusion, Lance's rise and Kyle's demise allows a rewrite of the community's history as it comes to terms with something else posing as grief.

Goldthwait, whose last film, Sleeping Dogs. explored why a few particular truths should never be revealed, whips around 180 degrees in World's Greatest Dad to confront a community (country?) who must acknowledge its failed past, collectively and individually.

Although the premise and conclusion of World's Greatest Dad are not as daring as the bitch'n' heat Sleeping Dogs, the film's ultimate point is a poignant one: staying true to one's true self is the loneliest modus vivendi in our age of destruct/decept-ion.