World's Greatest Dad

Saw World's Greatest Dad, a dark comedy starring Robin Williams. The story follows a frustrated writer (Robin Williams) with a horrible son who only thinks about sex and sneeringly hates everything and every one. Robin's character's life is one of endless, cartoonish humiliation and frustration. He works at a private school where he must always answer for his son's perverted shenanigans. He's "dating" the faculty flirt who adopts a sickening cute-little-girl persona every time she's being mean. "You're not maaaaad are you?" she whines as she breaks another date with Robin. It's Todd Solondz-level grimness.

Anyway, one day Robin finds his son dead from auto-erotic asphyxiation and, to save his face one last time, hoists his pants up and composes a fake suicide note about how no one understood him and how he was so sensitive inside. The note catches the school by storm and the idiot, horn-dog, jerk kid becomes the ideal dream friend of every student in the school. They beg Robin for more of his son's inner-life and, Robin being a frustrated writer, is happy to supply more ghost-written material.

The film is comic but very dark. I didn't know if I could take much more of the human smiley-face Robin Williams being abused mocked and belittled by his son and by life in general. Robin's character has a pathetic, grimy quality to him. There's another teacher who is smarter, hotter, and a better teacher than he is. That teacher's frustration later in the film, as Robin's star rises, is sweet succor to Robin. The satire is acid and well-drawn. I loved hating the vacuous girlfriend and being pettily jealous of the better teacher. When Robin is starting to get praise and recognition, that too is vapid and silly. "Father/Hero" reads the text under his face on an Oprah-like talk-show.

I was sort of worried that we'd start to get a bit Randian. Was the small, pathetic teacher supposed to be the villain (or anti-hero) for cheating his way to the top? This other teacher is clearly better in every way than Robin is and the only way Robin gets the better of him is via an outrageous lie. I felt that either Robin would come clean, triggering an outrage every bit as vacuous as the praise he was receiving, or he would continue this lie forever, falling into phoniness and villainy. I felt the ending of the film let him off very lightly. The film wants to redeem him but doesn't want him to suffer. But he's selfishly tricked the whole (admittedly stupid) town, so why should he get off Scot-free?

I felt the ending was off, but the rest of it is great. Wry and well-observed, full of little hilarious details like Robin snidely observing that The New Yorker is a fine publication he guesses but it isn't a national magazine. A sometimes painful but fun and silly movie. It has some vague motions at moralizing that I don't think really stick, but the rest of the film is good enough, I'll give it a pass. A nice little film.