“World’s Greatest Dad” shoots a poisoned arrow at the grotesque sentimentality that often attaches to the death of a teenager, in this case apparently a suicide, and the toxin leaks all over the place. After watching this extreme satire, written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, you may never want to attend another memorial for anyone at which tearful testimonials are read, gooey ballads sung and the memory of the deceased slathered with mawkish bromides. With a merciless acuity this nihilistic comedy ridicules collective grief and the news media’s cynical marketing of inspirational uplift after a death. Ultimately it scorns the human impulse to find a deeper meaning in any tragedy.

The film’s posthumously canonized youth, Kyle (Daryl Sabara), is the furthest thing from the shining young Apollos whose early deaths have sparked a literary subgenre since “A Separate Peace.” A pudgy, foulmouthed, bigoted, not-so-bright loser, obsessed with masturbation and the grossest pornography, Kyle has only one friend, Andrew (Evan Martin), a skinny, quivering reed of a boy with whom he occasionally does homework.

About 40 minutes into a movie that dawdles during its first half, Kyle’s father, Lance Clayton (Robin Williams), a divorced failed novelist and poetry teacher in his son’s high school, discovers Kyle dead from autoerotic asphyxiation in front of his computer. On the screen are digital pictures Kyle has surreptitiously taken of Lance’s sometime girlfriend Clarie (Alexie Gilmore), the school’s art teacher, with her legs parted under the table in the restaurant where the three recently had dinner.

Lance impulsively rearranges the scene to make it look as though Kyle deliberately hanged himself, types a lengthy, emotional suicide note on Kyle’s computer and stuffs it in his shirt pocket, then calls the police.

The escalating orgy of grief begins after Kyle’s fellow students hack the police report of his death and pass around the bogus suicide note, which is published in the school paper and reveals Kyle to have been a lonely, misunderstood genius with a poetic soul. It intensifies into a national mediathon after Lance concocts a phony journal kept by his son, titled “You Don’t Know Me.”

In “World’s Greatest Dad” the concept is everything. Cinematically the movie doesn’t amount to much. Even a cursory analysis of its plot reveals glaring holes. Its characters, many viewed with undisguised contempt, are barely sketched stereotypes. Clarie, in particular, is a vapid, chirpy narcissist who juggles Lance’s affections with those of Mike (Henry Simmons), an English teacher, who, to Lance’s silent chagrin, has his first story published in The New Yorker.

Even though he narrates the movie, Mr. Williams’s Lance remains a poker-faced enigma. Early scenes show him struggling to communicate with Kyle, who loathes his father and is ashamed to be seen with him. As far as we can see, Lance is an understanding, tolerant single parent.

The movie offers no solid clues as to why he rearranges the death scene, types the note or writes the journal. In the real world Lance’s meddling and forgery would surely be found out. The movie’s only character who detects something fishy is meek little Andrew. Everyone else is pathetically eager to wallow and to cash in on a fraud that the film is honest enough to admit changes people’s lives for the better.

In its bone-deep cynicism “World’s Greatest Dad” recalls “Being There,” whose central character, a dimwitted gardener played by Peter Sellers, ascends to becoming a national guru when his remarks are misinterpreted as profound philosophic riddles. The martyred Kyle becomes the adolescent version of that — a sanctified contemporary Holden Caulfield of teenage angst: a boy too sensitive to live. Cynics rejoice!

By Stephen Holden
NY Times, August 21, 2009