The late actor and comedian may never have been better and sadder than in the dark comedy World’s Greatest Dad .
Robin Williams in World's Greatest Dad
Magnolia Pictures
Robin Williams could do anything, given the right material or the right platform. In a career that went from TV to stand-up to the stage to the big screen, and that ended abruptly and tragically with his death on Monday, Williams proved he was a tremendous comedian, a legendary improviser, and a seemingly boundless font of energy who was able to turn the volume down dramatically to take on serious roles. He could be big and electric, voicing a role like the Genie in Aladdin, and he could shrink himself down to play a pleased-with-himself killer in Insomnia or a desperately lonely technician in One Hour Photo. He worked in the tireless way that people do when they truly love something, and in the restless way that people do when they're never really satisfied with their output.
He was in his purest form as a stand-up: mile-a-minute, effervescent, slipping from voice to voice and thought to thought. When squeezing himself into characters on screen, the results could vary. He was particularly fond of playing holy clowns, the bright, rebellious, occasionally martyred voices of warmth and humor and madness in the middle of unforgiving worlds — like the role he got his first Academy Award nomination for in Good Morning, Vietnam, or his part in The Fisher King, which was also Oscar-nominated. His earnestness could crossover into treacly, in movies like Patch Adams or Bicentennial Man. But it could be powerful and moving, like when he was the best possible replacement dad in Dead Poets Society or Good Will Hunting, loving but firm, shucking off cynicism, coaxing the young men in his care out from behind their shells of defensiveness or indifference.
World's Greatest Dad
Magnolia Pictures
He plays a father in World's Greatest Dad, an 2009 indie written and directed by fellow comedian Bobcat Goldthwait that may be the Williams role that I love best of all. It's also one that is, for many reasons, almost unbearably sad to revisit now, not the least because it deals with themes of suicide, but also because its emotional epiphany is so hard-fought and so uncompromised, directly dealing with how people mourn and how we sanctify the dead.
Williams could go big (take Mrs. Doubtfire) and he could do weird (see his turn in Robert Altman's live-action Popeye), but no other movie has allowed him quite the same combination of emotional honesty and recognition of how strange, dark, and hilarious life can be as World's Greatest Dad did. The only other recent thing that came close was Williams' appearance on Season 3 of Louie, in which he and Louis C.K. are the only two attendees at a funeral for a man they both acknowledge was absolutely awful.
C.K. could have been borrowing from Goldthwait's film in sentiment — in it, Williams plays Lance Clayton, a high school English teacher, failed writer, and the father of a teenager boy named Kyle (Daryl Sabara) who's an unrepentant little shit. Kyle's nearly friendless and hates everything except for porn, and he's fond of throwing around the terms "fag" and "retarded" to refer to everything else, including his loving but exasperated single dad. Kyle dies in an accident involving masturbation, and in an act of parental love, Lance restages the scene as a suicide, penning a note that gets published in the school paper and makes Kyle posthumously popular for the fineness of his writing and his unflinching observations about identity and belonging.
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