Mediocre Movie Club Movie Reviews

World's Greatest Dad

2/23/2017

B+
3.25

A mild-mannered dad parents his misogynist douchebag of a son.

Directed by Bobcat Goldthwait
Starring Robin Williams and Daryl Sabara
Initial Review by Shane Setnor

“You guys didn't like Kyle. That's okay. I didn't either. I loved him. He was my son. But he was also a douchebag.”

During my junior year of high school my friend and classmate, Brandon, shot himself in the head in his ex-girlfriend’s backyard. This was the first time someone I knew (outside of a grandparent) had died. I had no idea how to react or what to do. I just worked the rest of my shift at a local Subway in dismay.

That day, my buddy and my brother picked me up from my shift, I told them about what Brandon did. (This was before texting and everyone having cell phones, so sometimes it took days for news to spread. Crazy.) For some reason, I felt myself smiling as I was telling them. I have no idea why I reacted this way. I knew the moment was big and I was supposed to be solemn, but I think I was overwhelmed by the enormity of the situation.

In the following days, the impact of his suicide continued to grow. At school, people cried and rallied together in the wake of losing their friend. Funeral plans were made, friends car-pooling with friends like we were going to a football game. Rumors spread. My one friend said he saw that Brandon had been cutting his arm (not true). Another rumor was that his ex-girlfriend found out she was pregnant with his child after he killed himself (true). It was simply comforting to talk about it and feel connected.

I even recall sitting in the locker-room after gym class, staring at Brandon’s locked and his spot on the bench. I remember a sophomore kid just casually sitting in that spot like it was nothing. As if Brandon never existed. In my mind, that spot should have been respected and revered. I remember thinking, “Well, it’s just a dirty ass bench in a high school locker room. Why should it be respected just because someone who is now dead sat on it?”

That’s when everything started to unravel for me.

Was I even Brandon’s friend?

We played basketball together, but only because we had a mutual friend. I remember talking with him about No Limit albums, but I doubt I ever had an in-depth conversation with him. He ws in to partying and grew up in a rough household, which resulted in him being somewhat of a bully, even if he was likable (so long as you weren’t his target).Was I invested in him as a person or was I invested in the situation and a chance to be a part of something huge?

When it came time for the funeral, despite the giant Catholic Church being full of hormonal high schoolers,I remember one kid being there. He was one of the victims of Brandon’s bullying. The kid for some reason liked provoking Brandon. Maybe he was just sticking up for himself, but the provocation resulted in Brandon kindly asking the kid to give him his seeing glasses so Brandon could punch him in the face. The kid obliged and Brandon punched him in the face. As I said before, he was a lkable bully and I consider that a classy bully move.

Someone said that the kid was there out of spite. As a fuck you to Brandon. But that just wasn’t it. That kid was part of the mourning now. To be a part of it, he was now convinced that the guy who tormented him was his friend. Brandon dying had caused the kid to whitewash his own personal history.

I don’t know why this happens. Why we whitewash the dead. Maybe it’s because we’re terrified of death and deep down, we’re all superstitious natives. As if talking ill of the dead leaves us open to divine retribution. Or maybe we’re so damn afraid of our own mortality that we retreat into being polite beings afraid to make a ripple. Or maybe it’s our own ego, trying to insert ourselves into a greater role in someone else’s life.

I don’t know why it happens, but I do know that World’s Greatest Dad perfectly captured this reaction. Bobcat Goldthwait’s script shows the absurdity of how we react to death. It shows that we’re all paying service to ourselves rather than the person who died.

Most importantly, through Robin Williams’s mourning father figure, it shows that we lose our own humanity when we allow others to steal away the experiences and personality of someone who has recently died. His character liberates us from white washing the dead. He lets us know it’s OK to have loved a douchebag. To love someone despite their atrocious character traits. To some extent, he’s giving us permission to forgive ourselves for being douchebags as well.

In the end, this script deserved better from Goldthwait the Director. Some soundtrack was distractingly bad and some of the performances were wanting, but not so much so that it ruins one of the darkest comedies I’ve ever seen.

B+

11 Comments

Bryan

2/23/2017 07:02:00 pm

I'm probably going to be the outlier on this one. The theme was intriguing, but the characters were too over the top for my liking.

The son was unbelievably perverse. I'd like to think there is some point where even the most weird high school boys draw a line in terms of behavior and words used with adults and peers, but I'm likely using rose colored glasses.

Robin Williams' girlfriend was an insecure trope of an always flirty girlfriend. How annoying.

Robin Williams played the role of father with no rules to a T, but it wasn't fun to watch.

The most redeeming part of World's Greatest Dad was the sidekick high school kids and their ever changing emotions.

Overall, not a fan of this one. C

Joe link

2/23/2017 08:12:08 pm

For starters, A-. Tackling this concept and illustrating it the way the movie does is really compelling. I disagree with Brian that Robin Williams wasn't fun to watch. Watching his character embrace the adulation being brought forth for "Kyle's writing" was fantastic. He played into this sad and grotesque sequence of events quite well. I mean, as perverse as his decisions were, was anything he did so out of the realm of what any parent would do for their child? Sure the circumstances are extreme, but the responses seemed reasonable.

Regarding Shane's initial review, I remember Brandon's funeral. I also remember deciding to go and having the distinct thought of "did I know Brandon well enough to go?" I probably didn't, but I justified my attendance in my own head anyways. I will say this, I certainly felt compelled to go. Almost as if I needed to go to experience the conclusion of this obsurd teenage tragedy in person. I wanted to be there for other friends (or maybe that's what I told myself), yet I sat in the back by myself at the church, then stood far away from everyone at the burial.

I didn't belong there. Yet, I cried and could barely control my emotions. I don't regret going. It was a worthwhile human experience that I wouldn't wish on anyone to witness for themselves. I liked Brandon, but I doubt he even knew my name.

2/23/2017 08:49:03 pm

I should have clarified that the first act of the movie was where most of my disdain can be directed.

Shane

2/23/2017 08:55:13 pm

I also kept thinking of this skit:

https://youtu.be/oDUGbGvQF04

Jon

2/27/2017 05:49:20 pm

In the list of movie subjects that automatically work on me, there's cults, real-life science applications, and any organic realization of joy. World's Greatest Dad adds another item, which is how jealously people guard their expressions of grief. My second favorite movie of 2016 (Manchester By the Sea) played this subject straight and honest, as did my third favorite movie of 2010 (Rabbit Hole), but Bobcat Goldthwait's transgressive and revelatory film builds an absurd, comedic structure on a foundation of real pain and loss. World's Greatest Dad certainly treats some of its characters as types and straw men to make its point, but when this subject's ground is so fertile, some unwanted weeds are going to spring up. The core of this film rings too true to get tied up with concern for how the poseur Goth girl is treated.

The film begins with Robin Williams' Lance (his greatest role, by a wide margin) living a life of quiet desperation, as described by Thoreau. He's internally vacant, and he thinks he can fill that void with tangible things like book deals and acclaim, or failing that, intangible things like the love of his repulsive son or his fickle coworker. Ignored by his students and disregarded by his peers, Lance is stuck with son Kyle as much as Kyle is stuck with him, both doomed to resent each other until some distant day in the future when Kyle moves into someone else's basement. Parks and Recreation, a show as bright as this movie is dark, has its characters affirm their love for each other by saying, "I love you and I like you" (as this movie has Lance ultimately say exactly that, Parks and Rec may very well have stolen the line). When Kyle dies in the most banal, humiliating, useless way possible, we see that even if Lance didn't like Kyle, because who could, he did somehow manage to love him based on his reaction and his attempt to preserve whatever dignity Kyle could muster.

It's here, after a half hour of introductions and a pretty good family comedy, that World's Greatest Dad becomes great. No one initially cares that Kyle's gone at first, but when his fake suicide note gets out, everyone senses an opportunity to steal some of the spotlight and suddenly become Kyle boosters, turning a future sex offender into a martyr for their own personal pain. It's all such an obvious lie that they're telling themselves, but the reaction is so elementally human, that it's easy to believe that the characters all believe it. 'What If' is the easiest question a person can ask themselves, as the answer requires no evidence, and everyone pictures a Kyle-that-lived as potentially validating their lifestyle. The negative, equally ugly side of the coin is the narcissistic assumption that their impact on Kyle's life was so huge that they might have driven him to his 'suicide.' Lance reaps the rewards of all this nonsense, gaining the love of everyone around him and the chance at future success, but it's not worth his damnation to a future of delusion and isolation, so he curtly pops everyone's bubble: you've been worshipping someone who died while masturbating to upskirt photos, a person who went out of his way to only be loved by the one person legally obligated to do so and tried hard to break that relationship, too.

2/27/2017 05:50:15 pm

Shane spent most of his review on a story, and I'd be remiss if I also didn't include my own experiences with sudden teenage death and my weird reactions to it. I also knew a kid who killed himself in high school. We went to different high schools when he died, but we had gone to grade school together. He was a shit-stirrer as a middle schooler, and he eventually burned through his goodwill with my group of friends, such that with a few months to go before school ended, we shut him out. That's more or less how we left it until I picked up the phone and was told he was dead. At the funeral, I lost it, taking the above approach of pretending that if only I had been nicer to someone who regularly goaded surrogates into freezing me out or fighting with me, then maybe he wouldn't have shot himself in the chest three years later. There's other nuances that I'm not going to get into in this forum, but the event itself and my reaction to it continues to bother me. I don't expect 17 year-olds to have a handle on emotional truth, but I do interrogate my feelings on the subject to this day.

The high school experience with death certainly illuminates my college experience with it. My freshman roommate was killed in the spring semester by a drunk driver, and I can still honestly say that I did not and do not feel anything about that, beyond the vague, undifferentiated sympathy one has for any single person anywhere who dies unexpectedly. I didn't go to the funeral or any services, and I never got the least bit emotional about it. We were not friends, and after that year was up, we likely never would've spoken to each other again, so my thinking at the time was that the timeline for that date just got moved up by a few months.

What I did observe during those couple of weeks after he died was how despicable I could have acted, and choose not to. Some, individuals who my roommate talked with me (who again, was not his friend) about despising, reacted as strongly as I did in high school. Others, who I'd never met before, showed up at my dorm room door, asking if they wanted to talk, possibly out of a genuine altruistic interest or possibly as some kind of grief vulture swooping in to feed themselves on second-hand pain. I could have comforted the wailing 'friend,' acted vulnerable with the vultures and, in all honesty, gotten some action, and talked with my teachers about putting off tests that I had that week, but I did none of those things. I ignored, declined, and acted as normally as I felt. I'm not going to congratulate myself for feeling nothing at the death of someone I lived with for five months, but that episode snapped into focus for me the value of self-knowledge, of feeling your feelings no matter how outwardly distasteful they might be.

The characters in the latter half of World's Greatest Dad obviously haven't learned that lesson. They were right the first time in their reactions to Kyle's death, but because Lance puts a bunch of teenage bromides (a little Holden Caulfield, a little grunge, a little John Hughes) into a suicide note, they suddenly feel acknowledged in their individuality, though they're all broadly going through the exact same thing and have likely ignored dozens of recommendations from teachers like Lance of better-written explications of existential ennui and desperation. People keep telling Lance that Kyle didn't die in vain, that his death meant something, a disgusting lie that Lance eventually rubs their useless noses in. Goldthwait used to be a stand-up comedian, and though I don't believe he does that anymore, he would fit right in with the hard-edged stand-up of today, where pleasant fiction is trampled on in favor of ugly truth. Even if he's now telling stories in a different way, Goldthwait gets that all the warm fuzzies in the world aren't worth the lies they're built on.

That's my favorite takeaway from World's Greatest Dad. One of my favorite Simpsons episodes has Lisa discover the black-hearted truth of Springfield's founder, but she chooses not to reveal the rock-solid evidence because the lie makes the town happy. The Simpsons is a fundamentally warm show, so that's a fine ending. If Goldthwait was in charge, Lisa would've done the opposite. The personal story of World's Greatest Dad is applicable to any political and historical reality, where contradictions and hypocrisies and amorality form the structure of all of human civilization, but so often, we plant a nice urban garden on top with a pretty flag and pretend everything's fine. These lies can take whatever form they will, like I'm successful because of my choices alone, or everything's going to be fine because of changing demographics, or it can't happen here because we're better than other people, but they are lies all the same. Societies are as vulnerable to self-deception as individuals are, whether they're grieving one death or a symbolic death of a nostalgic past that never existed in

2/27/2017 05:51:25 pm

(previous comment was cut off)

Societies are as vulnerable to self-deception as individuals are, whether they're grieving one death or a symbolic death of a nostalgic past that never existed in the first place. World's Greatest Dad might not be the best directed film (it isn't), and it might have a terrible soundtrack (it does), but it is a clear-eyed, if heightened, view of how easily manipulated our brains are, and how people can make themselves physically and emotionally rich by doing so. By owning our embarrassments instead of hiding them, by knowing ourselves in our best and worst qualities, by risking social acceptance for what is true, we can enter the paradise of eating pot brownies and watching a zombie movie marathon. Despite the film's obvious flaws, I love the theme too much to give the movie anything other than an A.

2/27/2017 11:53:01 pm

Regarding the scene where Lance finds Kyle following his most breathtaking orgasm, I think Bobcat deserves a lot of credit. He really focuses on Robin Williams' reaction for what seemed like an eternity. You just felt like the scene was going to cut away, but it didn't. It just kept going and going. And then to really cap it off by showing Lance string Kyle up in the closet doorway was almost too much for me. I wanted to turn away, but I forced myself to watch. The way he kisses his son's forehead afterward seemed to real to me.

Such a really well done scene, and unfortunately a reminder of Robin Williams' own demise

3/3/2017 10:13:10 am

That was an excellent scene. From 1000 feet away, his reaction of hanging his son might seem absurd, but in the context of that moment, it made sense. How would I react? I can't even imagine. I hope I'd be as decent as Lance.

John Robert Peters, Jr.

3/10/2017 04:56:05 pm

This shit is brutal. I can't believe it.

Cooker

3/14/2017 12:56:52 pm

It’s hard to imagine that this movie came from the mind of the crazy Zed from Police Academy. I met Bobcat Godthwait (I think last year) after a stand-up comedy performance. Nice guy, and apparently he makes good films.

Shadowing other comments, I lost two classmates over the course of my school career; one in 8th grade, (homicide) and one in 10th grade (suicide). I didn’t attend either funeral, but as a loner in a graduating class of over 700, I’d probably feel out of place. Both victims, however, did sit behind me a class the semester before they passed. I knew who they were.

I don’t believe anyone previously mentioned what was running through my mind a good chunk of the film, a reminder of the death of Robin Williams. I remember finding out in a Vermont hotel while I was at a conference that Williams had hanged himself. Therefore, that aspect of the film was a bit ironic and depressing for me.

Being a “last round” film, I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this. I thought the story was great, it was well acted, a lot of Bruce Hornsby (who I can’t really say I’m a fan of, but liked the musical selections), and overall a good selection. Kyle certainly was a douchebag, wasn’t he? And of course I'm going to enjoy a film where the lead character is a "struggling writer." Some of us just relate to that. Going with an A- on this one.

World's Greatest Dad

B+
3.25

Leave a Reply.

Authors

Categories

Archives

World's Greatest Dad

B+​3.25

Leave a Reply.

Authors

Categories

Archives

B+
3.25