The World's Greatest Dad is a smart and fresh comedy of the first class. It deals with life's realities in a funny way, which is certainly not something that's easy to accomplish. It makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time. Interestingly enough, this movie tackles the same topic as my last review, The Lovely Bones, (coping with the loss of a teenage child), but from a completely different angle.
Robin Williams has dealt with depression and drug problems in the past, as well as recently. The character he played in this movie was a lot like him in real life: depressed from dealing with the stresses of life, yet funny. Williams has played diverse roles throughout his acting career (funny man, lunatic, family man etc), but I think this was his most heartfelt.
He was a writer who was mainly ignored. He was a teacher whose students didn't care. Most importantly, he was the father of a despicable son who was so awful that you wanted to punch him hard in the gut. But, everything changes when his son accidentally kills himself while self-asphyxiating and masturbating. What a way to go, and boy did he have it coming, no pun intended.
Since Williams' character loved his son, even if he didn't like him, he was devastated. And the scene where he finds his dead son would have been a major tear-jerker given Williams' raw and real emotions, had it not been for the director's insertion of an upbeat and seemingly out-of-place song (and actually the music throughout the movie did help keep the tone light, as the tone of any comedy should be). The only rational thing for Williams to do after having found his dead son would be to make this embarrassing (and grossly hilarious and almost deserved) accident look like an intentional suicide, right? So he zips up the kid's pants and sits down and writes his son's fake suicide note. It turns out to be so beautiful that the entire school is transformed by its message. Williams soon realizes that he has the power to rewrite his son's life and give him a new legacy.
So Williams can make his son all that he wished he was when he was alive: brilliant, compassionate, caring. What's more is that he finally has an audience for his own writing by literally ghost-writing through his son. He goes as far as reverse-plagiarizing his son's journal, which ends up getting national attention for its quality. It would seem like a dream come true to a father in this position. But oh how heavy the truth weighs on one's heart. You know that all the artificial good feelings must truly be empty because in reality, the son is dead and the son was a schmuck.
If it weren't for all that was subtly and overtly funny in The World's Greatest Dad, it would be a really sad drama. But Williams rescued us by making it his own, and kept us smirking. Thank God the tone wasn't too heavy. Other characters I liked were the son's best friend as well as the neighbor; I could tell that these were characters that the writer/director cares about and probably knows in real life in one form or another. The last minute of the film was my favorite. Watch this movie and you'll like it.
