Plots Discussed.
Robin Williams is often recognized for the hyperactive, spontaneous combustion of id and need that drove his stand-up, parts of Mork and Mindy, parts of Good Morning, Vietnam, and Aladdin, among others, but he’s also given a number of quietly devastating performances where the canning of that id slides into deflated loss – he’s straight-jacketed by his inhibitions. Comedians-turned-dramatic-actors are often over-praised out of the snobbish belief that drama is graduation, but Williams has tapped his resigned, adrift qualities in comedies as well, such as the underrated The Best of Times, The Fisher King, and, now, writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait’s World’s Greatest Dad.
Williams’ character, Lance Clayton (even the name screams “not quite”), is that classic American signpost of failure: the unpublished writer teaching Arts classes with which only he (barely) holds an interest. The similarly-minded children instead flock to the hunkier, more congenial, charismatic Mike (Henry Simmons), the type of guy who lords his effortless extraordinariness over you as “understanding”, a hood of condescension. Mike, inevitably, also has chemistry with the pretty, younger Claire (Alexie Gilmore), who occasionally steals kisses from Lance in the hallway, addressing him in a fashion that many of us would reserve for that strange, perhaps incontinent, uncle visiting our new home for the first time. We’re told that Lance and Claire are (somehow) sleeping together, but it’s clear early on that, for Claire, Lance is part experiment (the old geek), part pity (the old geek) and part relief of boredom (why not?). Lance’s most humiliating, dispiriting, daily reminder of his inadequacy though is his teenage son, Kyle (Daryl Sabara – a long way from Spy Kids), a bitter, nasty SOB who thinks of little apart from cutting his father down and jerking off. World’s Greatest Dad is being called subversive in certain circles because Lance is given an unexpected hope of escape, of praise and redemption, through this prick’s accidental death.
There’s an interesting, uncomfortable comedy in the idea that love by blood is a contractual obligation with death as the only out, and World’s Greatest Dad is a picture that benefits from your knowledge of the first act turn beforehand – foresight gives it friction that Williams’ performance compliments, he’s bravely, consistently sincere in a movie that’s tonally all over the place. Goldthwait pulls a number of easy tricks that I’ve grown to hate in most everything celebrated as black comedy these days, from Heathers to Sex and Death 101 to this year’s Observe and Report; namely, everyone is a cipher, a cliché, easily mocked to score points, with sincerity as a last moment “we didn’t mean it” bail out. Williams is, purposefully, left out of this scheme; he’s raw, miserable, and he keeps pushing and pushing; he doesn’t judge or pre-cook Lance, even when he, kind of accidentally, exploits his son’s death for personal gain. We don’t believe Lance’s ironic fame for a minute, that’s Do-it-Yourself Satire 101 that never makes much sense (a more knowing joke would allow the children to maintain their chill guard; the desperation to join in having been replaced by the desperation to remain, fashionably, noticeably, apart); but we believe Lance.
World’s Greatest Dad, for better and worse, feels personal, and for that it’s better than most movies of its kind. Goldthwait’s learned a trick or two from John Waters and others of similar aim: to wear your threadbare competence in the medium as a badge of honor, as departure from the hypocrisy of more polished middle-class conventionality. Goldthwait’s first picture as writer-director, Shakes the Clown, is a short trapped in a feature’s body, and it falls apart after a particularly desperate murder frame-up, but it also has a funky integrity: a grungy artlessness that’s appropriate for the material, and Goldthwait’s lead performance as Shakes, a drunk clown living in a world apparently only populated with disgusting out-of-work performers, whores and corrupt cops bent on pestering them, is admirably committed. One can’t help but see Shakes and Lance, both stunted wannabe artists, as self-therapeutic responses to Goldthwait’s Muppet-voiced slob from beyond-lame Police Academy sequels. World’s Greatest Dad, despite the skittishness, the cop-out optimism (there’s an especially botched sex gag: we see a montage of students imagining an idealized Kyle in their lives, which then segues into Lance having sex with Claire, who orders him to take her from behind – we’re cheated the logical, foreshadowed, punch-line) is still all of an uncertain piece – you get what Goldthwait believes and wants in equal measure; the picture revealing itself to be as indebted to Meet John Doe as anything else; and the finale, while disappointing, gives Williams a line that has stuck with me: “he’s a douche bag, I didn’t like him, but I loved him.” I’d like to see Goldthwait take on Charles Bukowski, whose film adaptations have been burdened with an excess of “art”; maybe they could set one another free.
Though vastly different, Julie and Julia is another picture eaten with the distinct unhappiness of the aspiring artist who wakes up to find herself a distressingly ordinary zombie. This picture offers inevitable consolation, of course: both the titular women are, duh, real, and, hence, eventually do enough to warrant a movie. Meaning that both Julie and Julia fulfilled a dream of delayed actualization: of money and the comfort of recognition that many of us assume comes with getting paid to perform some variation of whatever it is we claimed we liked in high school or college. There’s a reason so many would-be artists can’t seem to find their art: they’ve got the wrong prescription: many people who claim art just want to be good at something (see Dianne Wiest in Hannah and Her Sisters). Julie and Julia taps into that disappointment more than I would have expected from a picture written and directed by Nora Ephron; she’s made the most charming movie of her career without mooting the underlying depression as much as could’ve been reasonably expected. This is the first mainstream picture I’ve seen that acknowledges why most of us probably blog, whether it be about cooking, our weekend, or, ahem, movies – to justify ourselves. Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a so-far failed writer, turns to a French cookbook of Julia Child’s (Meryl Streep) as distraction from successful friends and thankless jobs – she decides to cook every recipe in the book in a year and blog of her experiences along the way. To ensure we get the point, we’re given flashbacks of Julia’s life in France in the 1940s/50s, in which she’s revealed as someone equally at loss. For Julia, learning to cook becomes what her eventual book comes to represent for Julie, a self-definition apart from everything they’ve thoughtlessly submitted to in the past.
Julie and Julia coasts on a typically zesty, exuberant Streep caricature (her cartoons have more force, and truth, than many actors’ major-league stuff) and on the scenery and on a refreshing desire not to amount to much of anything, the picture doesn’t pump you up with plastic climaxes and “go team” sentiment. But there is something that holds my enthusiasm back a tad – I could’ve lived without Adams’ already tired wide-eyed, adorably daffy routine and the script doesn’t do her any favors either. We’re meant to see the two couples: the Childs (Streep and Stanley Tucci – also broad and wonderful) and the Powells (Adams and Chris Messina – also underfed and dull) and recognize the universality of their struggles, how their societies, separated by decades, miles and milieus, colored their uncertainty and their ambitions and eventual success, in differing yet similar fashions, both eventually achieving, presumably, at least partial peace. But the scale, as established in Ephron’s movie, is pathetically lopsided – and the Powells come off as spoiled, self-pitying babies by comparison. We see the Childs face an inability to have children and the Red Scare, and we see Julia weather distances and rejections to create a book, and subsequent career, of lasting value. And amidst it all, The Childs’ maintain a consumptive, passionate love for one another that transcends typical ideas of physical beauty. We see the Powells, contemporary New Yorkers, blandly attractive, face a yucky apartment and some rich-bitch friends, and maybe a pasta dish that’s a little bland, and maybe a grouchy boss or two, and maybe a touch of sexual apathy with one another because they are just too damned tired and that’s about it. A moment near the end – Julia’s second-hand dismissal of Julie’s project as frivolous – doesn’t register because we feel that Julia’s, if anything, being generous.
On the page, Jennifer’s Body read as fast, confident trash, it was more consistent than screenwriter Diablo Cody’s prior picture, Juno, and it didn’t have the troubling aftertaste (the unborn baby as fashion accessory – nothing more). But the movie, directed by Karyn Kusama, once of Girlfight, more recently of Aeon Flux, stumbles. Kusama has no feel for the material, she gives the picture a jerky, over-explanatory, start-n-stop flow that feels twice as long as it actually is; and this shakiness of tone and pace pushes Cody’s accidental cruelty to the forefront. (And you long for two humans to exchange just one bit of information that’s uncloaked in pop-cult-eating-its-own-tail wiseassery.) Jennifer’s Body is driven by Cody’s ridiculous, pandering insistence of self-indulgent indifference as truth; it’s a revenge of the have-nots picture that finds the have hunting the have-nots. That’s an interesting satirical idea, and it could play into our idea of girls like Megan Fox as the ultimate woman, and the picture occasionally flirts with criticism of teens so eaten with TV, movies, fame and the whole media mess in general that they’ve lost even the flimsiest idea of morality. (Watch for Adam Brody, who steals the picture.) But Jennifer’s Body isn’t a satire; it’s a symptom: an anthem to numbness to feeling. We’re never once meant to sympathize with Fox’s Jennifer: She’s presented to us, despite the female self-congratulation on display, as a male masturbatory object punished for being an object, the picture reaching its low an hour or so in with Jennifer’s vicious murder, seen in flashback, played for Cody’s usual, cheap, Talk Soup laughs. 
