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WORLD'S GREATEST DAD Send This Review to a Friend
For most of this surprising film writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait revels in utter cynicism, which makes “World’s Great Dad,” starring Roin Williams funny and endearing. But lacking the courage of its convictions, the film sputters with a contrived, unconvincing ending that negates the earlier pleasures.
Get this set-up. Williams plays Lance Clayton, a high school poetry teacher with dwindling class attendance and a frustrated writer whose attempts to be published have met with year after year of rejection. The one bright spot in his life is dating a pretty teacher named Claire (Alexie Gilmore), but he is given to botching the relationship.
Clayton is also a lonely single dad with an obnoxious, foul-mouthed teenage son named Kyle who thinks his dad is stupid, who is perpetually in trouble in school and at home masturbates to porn on his computer while toying with asphyxiation to heighten the pleasure. Daryl Sabara does a good job making Kyle disgusting and a total pain. I have to tell you more of the plot than I would like to reveal in order to make the key criticism.
Clayton finds his son dead through the asphyxiation routine gone wrong. Not wanting to reveal that his son died masturbating in such a manner, Clayton hangs him in a closet so it looks like suicide and writes a suicide note that he stuffs into Kyle’s pocket. The note is so sensitive and well written that the school population that hated Kyle suddenly reveres him as a poor lost soul that nobody recognized as worthy and Kyle becomes an icon, as does his dad as the mournful survivor, who is even invited on an Oprah like television show. Clayton has produced a journal, allegedly written by Kyle, and it is a publication sensation.
The cynicism and irony in a would-be writer acquiring fame only through his faked work in the name of his horror of a son constitute witty satire, and Williams plays the role straight, going with the flow as a nebbish and loner who loved his son only as a father must while not liking anything about him. Knowing the ways that filmmakers have of chickening out, I was waiting for the disappointment. And sure enough it came through a sell-out ending as a school library is dedicated to Kyle and his father gives a speech. Figure out for yourself what happens. A Magnolia Pictures release.
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