Philadelphia Weekly

I first saw Bobcat Goldthwait’s World’s Greatest Dad at a film festival last April, spending the entire time shocked that a) any movie would dare make a central gag out of auto-erotic asphyxiation and b) somebody would so wickedly and insightfully lampoon every narcissistic impulse that makes public grieving so horrifically tacky.

The filmmaker (who by the way, doesn’t actually speak in that demented drunk Sesame Street Grover voice that served him well in Police Academy sequels) eventually confessed to whipping out his cell phone and dialing the movie’s star Robin Williams during the raucous screening—just so Mork could hear us losing our shit.

It’s a troublesome picture. Dark, ugly and very special indeed.

I scribbled all these notes into my journal, long before the tragic fates of David Carradine and Michael Jackson threw the themes of World’s Greatest Dad into sicker, more perfect focus. Five months ago it was a lark—now the movie is a 2009 time capsule.


Robin Williams stars in rare, restrained performance as Lance Clayton, a failed writer and sputtering high school English teacher going nowhere fast. He’s penned eight or nine novels that have been rejected by every major publishing house and lives with his annoying teenage son Kyle ( Spy Kids’ child star Daryl Sabara)—who wastes days jerking off to internet porn and generally behaving like a dude who’s destined to end up on an FBI watch-list, someday.


The greasy-faced, flagrantly unappealing Kyle spends special dinners with Dad snapping up-skirt camera-phone photos of the old man’s girlfriend and posting them online. He’s a mouth-breathing, short-sighted, intellectually incurious little troll.


But then one day that auto-erotic asphyxiation routine finally gets the best of him … and suddenly he’s a saint.


Williams’ Lance finds his son dead—dick in hand with a noose around his neck—and in an exact inverse of The Carradine Situation, immediately decides to cover up the possible scandal by rearranging the death scene and penning a floridly heartfelt suicide note. With shades of Heathers lurking long in the wings, Kyle becomes a posthumous icon.


Rudimentary in its technique and distressingly reliant on musical montage sequences, World’s Greatest Dad nonetheless shocks and appalls by exposing the vanity of mourning in public and our often absurd sanctification of the dead.


Nobody ever liked Kyle … not even his Dad, really.


But somehow, this little shit’s passing presents an opportunity for a massive outpouring of emotion, a “shared moment” that everybody involved can transform into something that’s really just all about themselves. The sideline presence of Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic as an extra only makes the laughs stick further in your throat. (Has it really been 15 years since Kurt Cobain’s suicide turned into a circus sideshow?)


The brilliantly cynical World’s Greatest Dad deals with grief as a fashion statement—all the posturing that makes survivors feel better about themselves for caring after the fact. It’s brutal stuff. Kids from Kyle’s high school—popular folks who would never have given him the time of day when he was alive—wind up wearing T-shirts that transpose the portly zit-faced teen into famous Che Guevara poses. 


Meanwhile Robin Williams has such a surfeit of energy, and so often falls into hacky comic voices, you can be forgiven for forgetting just how great he can be when he’s restrained. This is his most tightly controlled and exquisitely understated performance since The Birdcage.


Goldthwait’s previous picture, Sleeping Dogs Lie, was by all accounts the most thoughtful and introspective movie ever made about a chick who blew her dog. Bobcat’s got a way of tackling tough topics from unexpected angles. Like it or not, our old friend Zed from those Police Academy movies is turning into one hell of a filmmaker. B+