World's Greatest Dad (2009)

Bobcat Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad arrives from 2009, a full decade before the culture settled into its current posture, and it shows. Robin Williams plays Lance Clayton, a failed novelist and high school poetry teacher whose loathsome son dies in an autoerotic asphyxiation accident, prompting Lance to stage the death as a suicide and then author a fraudulent journal in the boy's name. The premise is cruel and elegant. The film's instincts, however, belong to an older tradition of misanthropic comedy, one that finds the absurdity in human vanity without reaching for a syllabus.

The satire lands squarely on grief culture, on the publishers, talk shows and school administrators who convert a dead teenager into a marketable saint. That is a target adjacent to the modern preoccupation with late capitalism, but the film never makes the leap. It is offended by hypocrisy, not by the system that rewards it. The cast is almost entirely white, with Henry Simmons and Jermaine Williams appearing in minor roles that carry no commentary whatsoever. Race does not enter the frame as a subject. Neither does queerness, nor the body, nor the climate, nor any historical record in need of correction. Claire, the girlfriend, drifts between Lance and a younger colleague like a plot device with a parking space.

Where the film could have sermonized, it prefers farce. The confession at the library dedication is a set piece of self-immolation, not a lesson. Goldthwait observes, he does not instruct, and the result is a comedy that trusts its audience to draw the indictment themselves. This is an increasingly rare posture. The film earns its discomfort honestly, and asks nothing of us but attention.