Review of World's Greatest Dad (2009) by Paul Z — 08 May 2010

There's nothing like death to flutter the mob mentality. Take Michael Jackson, who was a hip and skillful entertainer. Nevertheless was he held in such high regard a week before his death as he was a week after? What precisely did it signify when fans organized the all-night vigil at Neverland? Some were stimulated by sadness, more maybe by a hankering to partake by proxy in celebrity. Like sports fanatics, they pursue integrity through the remote recipients of their sentiment. People love to cast judgment on and take aim at Woody Allen for marrying his much younger stepdaughter, or Roman Polanski for taking advantage of a young girl, but when they die, I'll bet all will be genuflecting and lamenting the loss of a genius and an artist and a talent, etc.

Bobcat Goldthwait makes a valiant, seamless attack in World's Greatest Dad against our tendency to make folklore out of the dead. Robin Williams has that berserk surface he revels in, and he works better when he's bound to a nuanced role. Here he plays Lance, a high school teacher, the divorced father of a hateful youngster. A gravely good performance by ex-Spy Kid Daryl Sabara as Kyle, the repulsive son. Kyle is a compulsive masturbator who makes no effort to hide his hobby from his father. At school, he's an obscene misogynist, degrading girls in the hallways. Invariably he is as bitter and spiteful as he can possibly be, and is categorically avoided by the student body, with the disheartening anomaly of Andrew, his "friend" and punching bag who spends his evenings at Lance and Kyle's to avoid his embarrassing alcoholic mother. He is polite and mild-mannered, the opposite of Kyle.

The key to the film's biggest laughs is the resounding hollowness of every peripheral character, from Lance's noncommittal girlfriend who has eyes on a new fellow teacher, whose sob story is listened to because he has the body of a basketball star, to the school principal, who advises Lance that Kyle should be sent to a special-needs school. Even while it builds at first as an bleakly affectionate character study, it is shifting into uncanny high satire, and it is hard not to identify with every fine point of Goldthwait's portrayal of a thoroughly shallow society whose search for prophets and leaders results in artificial figures of nobility, something that hasn't been done this acutely well since Alexander Payne's Election or South Park.

But instead of weaving a distillation of US politics or characterizing allegories, Goldthwait just keeps it really simple, and ends up saying so much about high school bureaucracy and pack mentality, the extremes of father-son bonding, blind hero worship, the superficial nature of media fascination, the moral grey of opportunism and the need to belong, all of which leads to a well-earned over-the-top repression release set to Under Pressure with which everyone will be able to lovingly and cheerfully relate.