When Robin Williams tries to be funny, he’s a delight.
When Robin Williams tried to be serious, he’s a travesty. He overacts, he gets maudlin, he tries to squeeze out tears and succeeds only in becoming funny-looking. And when he teams with comedian-turned-director Bobcat Goldthwait, as in "World’s Greatest Dad," which opens today, they create a terrible mess of what probably was supposed to be a satire.
Williams, as Lance Clayton, teaches poetry on a high-school level to a class of only five or six kids. He lusts after a fellow-teacher, Claire (played feebly by Alexie Gilmore), is hardly above the hello-goodbye level with other faculty members and is disrespected by not only his students, but also, and more horrifically, by his 15-year-old son, Kyle (the sullen Daryl Sabara), whose interests are primarily in unpleasantness, pornography and masturbation, the latter heightened by various auto-erotic behaviors. He also is a would-be writer who has collected rejection slips for novels, short stories, poems and all other types of commercial writing.
Obviously, Clayton once had a wife, but there are few references to her.
After some 40 minutes of insulting his father, Kyle takes self-satisfaction to a new level, and dies at his computer, whose screen shows fuzzy pictures of Claire’s crotch, surreptiously taken
by Kyle while the three were having dinner. Lance finds the body and writes a suicide note, blaming the other students for not liking him.
When the suicide note shows up in the school paper, Kyle turns into James Dean or anyone else who died too young, becoming an instant cult figure and sparking a cottage industry of T-shirts, posters and tattoos that say WWKD.
Lance is a tragic hero, lionized in Oprah-style talk shows, but Claire, even shallower than he, soon leaves him for another teacher whose first writing effort is bought by the New Yorker magazine. But the tragic hero gambit can only be played for so long, and neither Goldthwait’s writing nor his direction, plus a banal, treacly ending are strong enough to create much entertainment value.
At multiple theaters.
–Joe