There are two Robin Williamses, one the manic comic who gained fame with Mork and Mindy, and the other the Oscar-winning star of serious dramas such as Awakenings, Good Will Hunting, and One Hour Photo. I never found his zaniness all that funny, and his comedies have tended to dreck like License to Wed and Death to Smoochy. Now he’s teamed up for a comedy with writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait, another former stand-up comic I was never wild about. (I’m not one for annoying voices either.) So what do you know, this is pretty decent.
It’s a little more edgy than many films Williams has done. He’s the well-intentioned single dad to a teen (Daryl Sabara of Spy Kids) who’s truly obnoxious, and not in a snarky, Ferris Bueller sort of way, but in a creepily sex-obsessed, nobody-likes-me sort of way. Right when it seems like the movie is going to be about Williams’s milquetoast, teacher/unpublished author trying to bond with this hard-to-love boy, it turns into something else. It would be a disservice to give away the key plot point, but it gives the middle-aged man an unexpected way to achieve his literary ambitions, and the boy an unexpected, and probably undeserved, reassessment by his classmates.
From a comic drama it becomes an almost over-the-top satire of American culture at its shallowest. If you don‘t mind the change in tone and some crudeness (i.e., Dad discovering his son’s autoerotic habits), Goldthwait and Williams have created a fairly funny look at perception and self-perception.
IMDB link
viewed 8/11/09 [screening at Ritz Bourse] and reviewed 9/10/09
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